The Buffalo 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
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
71° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1977. Next is 70° in 1999.
Buffalo’s center stands about 1,000 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 950 ft to 1,050 ft, a difference of 100 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Upper Cambrian (sandstone, siltstone, shale), from the Cambrian, 487 to 497 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 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.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 497 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Middle Cambrian to Cambrian, 487 to 521 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Claystone, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 113 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Orthogneiss. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.2 billion years old. About 0.6 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 Buffalo reaches the Gulf of America by way of Frederick Creek, the North Fork Crow, the Crow and the Mississippi: about 1,900 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Pepin.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Buffalo; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Buffalo has a cold desert climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 4° in January. Barely 0.0 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Buffalo normally reaches 42° and falls to 25°. The record high is 68°, in 1990; the record low 3°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.75 in, fell in 1996.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1977 at Delano, 10 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
