The St. Olaf 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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76° on Nov. 12, 1964, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 76° in 1999.
St. Olaf’s center stands about 890 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 800 ft to 1,100 ft, a difference of 300 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Chicken Ridge, about 1,170 ft, 8 miles south-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Galena Group and Platteville Formation (dolostone, limestone), from the Late Ordovician, 447 to 459 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 36×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale, dolostone. Age: Late Ordovician, 447 to 454 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Late Ordovician, 447 to 459 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Dolostone, sandstone. Age: Early Ordovician to Late Ordovician, 454 to 487 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Late Ordovician to Silurian, 434 to 447 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, dolostone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 497 million years old. About 0.4 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 St. Olaf reaches the Gulf of America by way of Roberts Creek, the Turkey and the Mississippi: about 1,630 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of St. Olaf; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
St. Olaf has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 6° in January. A normal year brings about 36 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 39 inches of water.
On November 14 St. Olaf normally reaches 46° and falls to 25°. The record high is 71°, in 1990; the record low −3°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 1.05 in, fell in 1902.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Elkader 6 SSW, 11 miles south-southwest, 100 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
