The Piercefield 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; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
70° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1899. Next is 68° in 1983.
Piercefield’s center stands about 1,570 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,500 ft to 2,410 ft, a difference of 910 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Morris, about 3,130 ft, 7 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Interlayered amphibolite and granitic, charnockitic, mangeritic, or syenitic gneiss (amphibolite, gneiss), 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 13×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Amphibolite, gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Gneiss, monzonite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Metasedimentary, migmatite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
Gneiss, metaanorthosite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 0.4 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 Piercefield reaches the St. Lawrence River by way of Dead Creek, the Raquette and the Saint Lawrence: about 100 river miles. The St. Lawrence carries it on to the Atlantic.
Lake on the way: Stark Falls Reservoir.
65 miles of the trip are on the Raquette.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Piercefield; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Piercefield has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 78° in July; winter nights fall to about 4° in January. About 45 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Piercefield normally reaches 43° and falls to 25°. The record high is 63°, in 2010; the record low −2°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.50 in, fell in 1975.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1899 at Tupper Lake Sunmount, 7 miles east, 110 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
