The Birch Cooley 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
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
78° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1892. Next is 75° in 1953.
Birch Cooley’s center stands about 1,020 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 820 ft to 1,050 ft, a difference of 230 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Granitic orthogneiss and migmatite (orthogneiss, migmatite), from the Paleoarchean to Mesoarchean, 2.8 to 3.6 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 63×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Orthogneiss, migmatite. Age: Paleoarchean to Mesoarchean, 2.8 to 3.6 billion years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Orthogneiss. Age: Paleoarchean to Mesoarchean, 2.8 to 3.6 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Granitic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone, mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Tonalite, granodiorite, diorite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 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 Birch Cooley reaches the Gulf of America by way of Woelfel Slough, the Minnesota and the Mississippi: about 2,020 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Pepin.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Birch Cooley; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Birch Cooley has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 6° in January. About 28 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Birch Cooley normally reaches 43° and falls to 25°. The record high is 74°, in 2025; the record low −8°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.53 in, fell in 1909.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1892 at Redwood Falls Municipal Airport, 7 miles west. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
