The Wappinger 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.
Mostly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
76° on Nov. 16, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1931. Next is 73° in 1964.
Wappinger’s center stands about 250 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 30 ft to 470 ft, a difference of 440 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is South Beacon Mountain, about 1,580 ft, 8 miles south-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Austin Glen Formation (graywacke, shale), from the Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old.
The section below crosses 9 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.
Granite, gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Graywacke, shale. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale, quartzite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Early Cambrian, 521 to 1,000 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Argillite, shale. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, conglomerate, limestone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million 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. 3 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 Wappinger reaches New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Wappinger Creek and the Hudson: about 75 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Wappinger; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Wappinger 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 Wappinger 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, 3 miles north). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
