The Union Vale 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.
76° on Nov. 16, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1931. Next is 73° in 1964.
Union Vale’s center stands about 1,090 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 450 ft to 1,220 ft, a difference of 770 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Ellsworth Hill, about 1,560 ft, 14 miles east-northeast.
The section below crosses 16 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 16×. 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: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Schist. Age: Neoproterozoic to Cambrian, 487 to 1,000 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Phyllite, schist, metagraywacke. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Marble. Age: Cambrian to Early Ordovician, 471 to 542 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Metasedimentary, hornblende-gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 10 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Union Vale reaches New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Jackson Creek, Sprout Creek, Fishkill Creek and the Hudson: about 90 river miles.
60 miles of the trip are on the Hudson.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Union Vale; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Union Vale has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. About 42 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Union Vale normally reaches 52° and falls to 32°. The record high is 72°, in 1973; the record low 13°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 2.01 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1931 from the Poughkeepsie Area threaded record (Poughkeepsie/Hudson Valley Regional Airport, 11 miles west-southwest, 940 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.