The Dawson 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.
Sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy; cooler
Showers likely
−11° on Nov. 12, 1966, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1940. Next is −7° in 2014.
Dawson’s center stands about 1,050 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,030 ft to 1,090 ft, a difference of 60 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Granitoid gneiss with dioritic to amphibolitic enclaves (orthogneiss), from the Paleoarchean to Mesoarchean, 2.8 to 3.6 billion 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 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.
Orthogneiss. Age: Paleoarchean to Mesoarchean, 2.8 to 3.6 billion years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone, mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 100 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Leucocratic-granitic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 3 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 Dawson reaches the Gulf of America by way of the West Branch Lac qui Parle, the Lac qui Parle, the Minnesota and the Mississippi: about 2,140 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Pepin.
1,750 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Dawson; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Dawson has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 3° in January. A normal year brings about 47 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 26 inches of water.
On November 14 Dawson normally reaches 42° and falls to 23°. The record high is 75°, in 1990; the record low −7°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.46 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1940 at Madison Wwtp, 8 miles northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
