The Otter Lake plate. Relief from Copernicus GLO-30; rivers and lakes from USGS NHD; watersheds from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset; roads and city limits from Census TIGER 2024.
Chance of showers
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70° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1949. Next is 66° in 1956.
Otter Lake’s center stands about 1,510 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,440 ft to 1,910 ft, a difference of 470 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Ice Cave Mountain, about 2,690 ft, 13 miles east.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Interlayered metasedimentary rock and granitic, charnockitic, mangeritic, or syenitic gneiss (metasedimentary, gneiss), from the Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 12×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Metasedimentary, gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Metasedimentary, migmatite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale.
Heights from Copernicus GLO-90 (a surface model: it includes buildings and tree canopy); summits from USGS GNIS; rivers from USGS NHDPlus HR; rock from the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation.
A raindrop that lands in Otter Lake reaches Lake Ontario by way of the Otter Lake Outlet, the Long Lake Outlet, Cummings Creek and the Black River: about 100 river miles. From the lake it goes down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Otter Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Otter Lake has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 75° in July; winter nights fall to about 8° in January. A normal year brings about 164 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 58 inches of water.
On November 14 Otter Lake normally reaches 42° and falls to 26°. The record high is 61°, in 2010; the record low −1°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.95 in, fell in 1961.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1949 at Boonville 4 SSW, 17 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
