The Belle Plaine 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.
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
74° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1942. Next is 72° in 2012.
Belle Plaine’s center stands about 870 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 710 ft to 1,000 ft, a difference of 290 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Middle and Upper Cambrian (sandstone, siltstone, shale), from the Middle Cambrian to Cambrian, 487 to 521 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 54×. 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, siltstone, shale. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 497 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Middle Cambrian to Cambrian, 487 to 521 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 3 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 Belle Plaine reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Minnesota and the Mississippi: about 1,870 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Pepin.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Belle Plaine; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Belle Plaine has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about 5° in January. A normal year brings about 40 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 33 inches of water.
On November 14 Belle Plaine normally reaches 42° and falls to 26°. The record high is 69°, in 1990; the record low −5°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.23 in, fell in 2010.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1942 at Jordan 1 SSW, 7 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
