The Buffalo 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 cloudy; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
12° on Nov. 14, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1938. Next is 18° in 1967.
Buffalo’s center stands about 580 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 540 ft to 960 ft, a difference of 420 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Fisher Knob, about 1,090 ft, 14 miles east.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Quaternary Alluvium (fine-detrital, coarse-detrital), from the Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 35×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous to Permian, 252 to 324 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, mudstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, mudstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.6 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 Buffalo reaches the Gulf of America by way of Cross Creek, the Kanawha, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,700 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Buffalo; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Buffalo has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. A normal year brings about 11 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 40 inches of water.
On November 14 Buffalo normally reaches 58° and falls to 34°. The record high is 79°, in 1955; the record low 12°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.80 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1938 at Winfield Locks, 7 miles south-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
