The Rapid City 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 cloudy
Mostly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
74° on Nov. 11, 2022, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1938. Next is 68° in 2020.
Rapid City’s center stands about 630 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 570 ft to 950 ft, a difference of 380 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Bundy, about 1,180 ft, 15 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ellsworth Shale, from the Late Devonian, 359 to 384 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 27×. 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: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 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 Rapid City reaches Lake Michigan by way of the Rapid and the Torch: about 15 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Lake on the way: Elk Lake.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Rapid City; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Rapid City has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 79° in July; winter nights fall to about 10° in February. A normal year brings about 132 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 34 inches of water.
On November 14 Rapid City normally reaches 43° and falls to 28°. The record high is 64°, in 1999; the record low 13°, in 1995. The most rain on this date, 0.58 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1938 at Kalkaska, 10 miles southeast, 400 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
