The Ransomville 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
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
11° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1951. Next is 14° in 1959.
Ransomville’s center stands about 320 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 290 ft to 400 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Queenston Shale, from the Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million 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 44×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 425 to 434 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Silurian, 428 to 445 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Silurian, 434 to 445 million years old. About 0.3 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 Ransomville reaches Lake Ontario by way of Twelvemile Creek: about 11 river miles. From the lake it goes down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Often dry. About 50% of the way is mapped as streams that run only after rain or snowmelt; the water makes the whole trip in floods.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Ransomville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ransomville has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. About 33 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Ransomville normally reaches 48° and falls to 32°. The record high is 65°, in 2009; the record low 23°, in 2004. The most rain on this date, 0.50 in, fell in 1961.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1951 at Niagara Falls International Airport, 9 miles south, 260 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
