The Alvarado 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 sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
65° on Nov. 13, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1965. Next is 65° in 2025.
Alvarado’s center stands about 810 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 800 ft to 840 ft, a difference of 40 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Upper Ordovician (limestone, dolostone), from the Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 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 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Granodiorite, diorite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone, mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 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 Alvarado reaches Hudson Bay by way of the Snake, the Red River of the North and the Nelson: about 900 river miles. Past the border it runs north through Canada to Hudson Bay.
Lake on the way: Lake Winnipeg.
400 miles of the trip are on the Nelson.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Alvarado; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Alvarado has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about −3° in January. A normal year brings about 48 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 22 inches of water.
On November 14 Alvarado normally reaches 36° and falls to 18°. The record high is 65°, in 2025; the record low −3°, in 2002. The most rain on this date, 0.26 in, fell in 2005.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1965 at Grand Forks International Airport, 19 miles south-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
