The Manchester 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.
70° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1940. Next is 65° in 2022.
Manchester’s center stands about 820 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 650 ft to 3,480 ft, a difference of 2,830 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Stratton Mountain, about 3,940 ft, 9 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Clarendon Springs Formation (dolostone), from the Cambrian, 487 to 497 million years old.
The section below crosses 12 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 7×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Dolostone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 497 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Paragneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1.2 to 1.2 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Quartzite. Age: Early Cambrian, 521 to 542 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Carbonate, marble, sandstone. Age: Early Ordovician to Middle Ordovician, 459 to 487 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Phyllite, metasiltstone. Age: Neoproterozoic to Cambrian, 487 to 1,000 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Quartzite, phyllite, dolostone. Age: Neoproterozoic to Early Cambrian, 521 to 1,000 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 6 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 Manchester reaches New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Batten Kill and the Hudson: about 230 river miles.
180 miles of the trip are on the Hudson.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Manchester; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Manchester has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 75° in July; winter nights fall to about 8° in January. About 51 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1940 at Peru, 11 miles northeast, 880 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.