The Windom 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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83° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1941. Next is 81° in 2016.
Windom’s center stands about 1,650 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,560 ft to 1,690 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Kiowa Shale and Cheyenne Sandstone (sandstone, black-shale), from the Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 60×. 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, black-shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Siltstone, sandstone, shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Claystone, mudstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 1 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 Windom reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Little Arkansas, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,420 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
600 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Windom; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Windom has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. A normal year brings about 12 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 30 inches of water.
On November 14 Windom normally reaches 56° and falls to 32°. The record high is 83°, in 1999; the record low 4°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.21 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1941 at Kanopolis Lake, 16 miles north, 160 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
