The Birch 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
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
Chance of showers
Showers likely
68° on Nov. 16, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1906. Next is 67° in 1953.
Birch’s center stands about 1,360 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,320 ft to 1,430 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Granitoid intrusion (granitic), from the Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old.
The section below crosses 5 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.
Tonalite, granodiorite, diorite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Metabasalt, greenstone. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Granitic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Granitic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Felsic-volcanic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion 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 Birch reaches the Gulf of America by way of Sugar Lake and the Mississippi: about 2,240 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Sugar Lake and 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 Birch; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Birch has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 79° in July; winter nights fall to about −4° in January. A normal year brings about 49 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 26 inches of water.
On November 14 Birch normally reaches 37° and falls to 20°. The record high is 66°, in 2016; the record low −13°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.05 in, fell in 1951.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1906 at Cass Lake, 18 miles south-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
