The Three Oaks 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
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
4° on Nov. 17, 1959, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 6° in 2019.
Three Oaks’s center stands about 680 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 620 ft to 730 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country.
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 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.
Shale. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 0.4 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 Three Oaks reaches Lake Michigan by way of Deer Creek, the South Branch Galien and the Galien: about 12 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Often dry. About 30% of the way is mapped as streams that run only after rain or snowmelt; the water makes the whole trip in floods.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Three Oaks; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Three Oaks has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. A normal year brings about 64 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 39 inches of water.
On November 14 Three Oaks normally reaches 48° and falls to 32°. The record high is 71°, in 1971; the record low 10°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.50 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 from the South Bend Area threaded record (South Bend Airport, 17 miles east-southeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
