The Otter 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.
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77° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1963. Next is 69° in 2012.
Otter Lake’s center stands about 870 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 790 ft to 980 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Michigan Formation (shale), from the Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 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.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 0.5 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 Otter Lake reaches Lake Huron by way of Butternut Creek, the Flint, the Shiawassee and the Saginaw: about 100 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
60 miles of the trip are on the Flint.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Otter Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Otter Lake has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 12° in January. About 34 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1963 at Vassar, 12 miles north-northwest, 240 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
