The Burnstown 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.
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79° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1961. Next is 75° in 2001.
Burnstown’s center stands about 1,020 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,000 ft to 1,070 ft, a difference of 70 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 4 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 14 mi of the line.
Orthogneiss. Age: Paleoarchean to Mesoarchean, 2.8 to 3.6 billion years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Quartzite, mudstone. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Granitic. 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 Burnstown reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Cottonwood, the Minnesota and the Mississippi: about 2,010 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Pepin.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Burnstown; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Burnstown has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 5° in January. A normal year brings about 46 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 29 inches of water.
On November 14 Burnstown normally reaches 43° and falls to 24°. The record high is 79°, in 1999; the record low −3°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.29 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1961 at Lamberton Southwest Research And Outreach Center, 19 miles west, 120 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
