The Dayton 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.
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
70° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1940. Next is 65° in 2010.
Dayton’s center stands about 900 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 830 ft to 960 ft, a difference of 130 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 2 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 23 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Middle Cambrian to Cambrian, 487 to 521 million 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 Dayton reaches the Gulf of America by way of Elm Creek and the Mississippi: about 1,850 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Pepin.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Dayton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Dayton has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 3° in January. A normal year brings about 36 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 33 inches of water.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1940 at Elk River, 10 miles northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
