The Cannon City 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.
73° on Nov. 11, 2012, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1961. Next is 71° in 1999.
Cannon City’s center stands about 1,200 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 950 ft to 1,210 ft, a difference of 260 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Middle and Upper Ordovician (shale, limestone, sandstone), from the Middle Ordovician to Late Ordovician, 445 to 471 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 60×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Dolostone, sandstone. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone, sandstone. Age: Middle Ordovician to Late Ordovician, 445 to 471 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 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 Cannon City reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Cannon and the Mississippi: about 1,830 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Pepin.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cannon City; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cannon City has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 5° in January. A normal year brings about 44 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 36 inches of water.
On November 14 Cannon City normally reaches 42° and falls to 26°. The record high is 71°, in 1999; the record low 5°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.37 in, fell in 1973.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1961 at Owatonna, 16 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.