The Mankato 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.
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
81° on Nov. 17, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1900. Next is 78° in 1952.
Mankato’s center stands about 1,770 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,660 ft to 1,860 ft, a difference of 200 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Niobrara Chalk (shale, limestone), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 52×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 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 Mankato reaches the Gulf of America by way of Middle Buffalo Creek, Buffalo Creek, the Republican, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,870 river miles.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Mankato; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Mankato has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 14° in January. A normal year brings about 24 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 28 inches of water.
On November 14 Mankato normally reaches 53° and falls to 26°. The record high is 75°, in 2025; the record low −1°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.46 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1900 at Burr Oak 4 S, 5 miles west. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
