The Bellingham 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
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy; cooler
Showers likely
−11° on Nov. 12, 1966, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1940. Next is −7° in 2014.
Bellingham’s center stands about 1,040 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,020 ft to 1,100 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Undifferentiated (conglomerate, sandstone, mudstone), from the Late Cretaceous, 72 to 100 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 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.
Conglomerate, sandstone, mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 100 million years old. About 19 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Orthogneiss, migmatite. Age: Paleoarchean to Mesoarchean, 2.8 to 3.6 billion 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 Bellingham reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Minnesota and the Mississippi: about 2,150 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Pepin.
1,750 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bellingham; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bellingham has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 3° in January. A normal year brings about 47 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 26 inches of water.
On November 14 Bellingham normally reaches 42° and falls to 23°. The record high is 75°, in 1990; the record low −7°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.46 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1940 at Madison Wwtp, 11 miles south-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
