The Cedar 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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81° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1940. Next is 75° in 2015.
Cedar’s center stands about 1,270 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,220 ft to 1,320 ft, a difference of 100 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Sioux Quartzite (quartzite, mudstone), from the Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2 billion 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 57×. 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 13 mi of the line.
Quartzite, mudstone. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Middle Cambrian to Cambrian, 487 to 521 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 497 million 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 Cedar reaches the Gulf of America by way of Cedar Creek, Elm Creek, the Blue Earth, the Minnesota and the Mississippi: about 2,060 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Pepin.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cedar; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cedar has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 5° in January. A normal year brings about 50 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 33 inches of water.
On November 14 Cedar normally reaches 44° and falls to 25°. The record high is 81°, in 1999; the record low −8°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.85 in, fell in 1944.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1940 at St. James Wwtp, 16 miles northeast, 200 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
