The West Warwick 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.
78° on Nov. 15, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1904. Next is 75° in 1909.
West Warwick’s center stands about 170 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 40 ft to 390 ft, a difference of 350 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Chopmist Hill, about 790 ft, 12 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Scituate Igneous Suite - alkali-feldspar granite (alkali-feldspar-granite), from the Late Devonian, 366 to 380 million 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 28×. 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. Age: Late Devonian, 366 to 380 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Alkali-feldspar-granite. Age: Late Devonian, 366 to 380 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 million years old. About 1.0 mi of the line.
Gneiss, amphibolite. Age: Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Quartzite. Age: Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 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 West Warwick reaches Narragansett Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Hawkinson Brook, the South Branch Pawtuxet, the Pawtuxet and the Providence: about 19 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of West Warwick; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
West Warwick has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 37 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 48 inches of water.
On November 14 West Warwick normally reaches 54° and falls to 36°. The record high is 75°, in 1993; the record low 16°, in 1905. The most rain on this date, 2.13 in, fell in 2009.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1904 from the Providence Area threaded record (Rhode Island T.F. Green International Airport, 5 miles east-northeast, 120 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.