The Littleton 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.
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80° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1963. Next is 75° in 1993.
Littleton’s center stands about 1,250 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 960 ft to 1,520 ft, a difference of 560 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bake Oven Knob, about 1,660 ft, 12 miles east-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Dunkard Group (sandstone, siltstone, shale), from the Carboniferous to Permian, 252 to 324 million years old.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 23×. 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 24 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 Littleton reaches the Gulf of America by way of West Virginia Fork Fish Creek, Fish Creek, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,870 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 Littleton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Littleton has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. A normal year brings about 16 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 46 inches of water.
On November 14 Littleton normally reaches 55° and falls to 32°. The record high is 73°, in 1971; the record low 12°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.82 in, fell in 1997.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1963 at Moundsville, 19 miles northwest, 630 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
