The Forest Lake 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
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 1962. Next is 72° in 1989.
Forest Lake’s center stands about 820 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 720 ft to 900 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Silurian System undivided (dolostone, limestone), 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 64×. 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, limestone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 23 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 454 million years old. About 0.8 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 Forest Lake reaches the Gulf of America by way of Indian Creek, the Des Plaines, the Illinois and the Mississippi: about 1,560 river miles.
Lake on the way: Peoria 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 Forest Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Forest Lake has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about 13° in January. A normal year brings about 38 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 40 inches of water.
On November 14 Forest Lake normally reaches 47° and falls to 31°. The record high is 72°, in 1989; the record low 5°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.54 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1962 at Barrington 3 SW, 9 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
