The Rochester 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 sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
73° on Nov. 11, 2022, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 72° in 1971.
Rochester’s center stands about 790 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 760 ft to 890 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Silurian, undivided (dolostone), from the Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 57×. 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: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 20 mi of the line.
Shale, dolostone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 4 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 Rochester reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Fox River, the Illinois and the Mississippi: about 1,570 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Peoria Lake and Fox Lake.
1,190 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Rochester; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Rochester has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about 11° in January. A normal year brings about 38 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 35 inches of water.
On November 14 Rochester normally reaches 46° and falls to 28°. The record high is 71°, in 1989; the record low 5°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.89 in, fell in 1951.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Burlington Wwtp, 6 miles south-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
