The Oxbow 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
Mostly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
75° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1936. Next is 72° in 2012.
Oxbow’s center stands about 350 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 340 ft to 570 ft, a difference of 230 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Poplar Hill, about 690 ft, 11 miles east.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Calcitic and dolomitic marble, from the Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 34×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Paragneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 497 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Marble. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Marble. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 2 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 Oxbow reaches the St. Lawrence River by way of the Oswegatchie and the Saint Lawrence: about 110 river miles. The St. Lawrence carries it on to the Atlantic.
Lake on the way: Lake Saint Lawrence.
55 miles of the trip are on the Oswegatchie.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Oxbow; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Oxbow has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 79° in July; winter nights fall to about 5° in January. A normal year brings about 92 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 40 inches of water.
On November 14 Oxbow normally reaches 46° and falls to 27°. The record high is 66°, in 1989; the record low −4°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.70 in, fell in 1951.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1936 at Gouverneur 3 NW, 7 miles northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
