The Forest Prairie 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.
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
74° on Nov. 14, 1990, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1887. Next is 69° in 1953.
Forest Prairie’s center stands about 1,140 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,090 ft to 1,220 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Rockville Granite and rocks inferred to be related, from the Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 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 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.
Granitic. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Schist, slate. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 0.9 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 Forest Prairie reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Clearwater and the Mississippi: about 1,930 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Pepin and Clearwater Lake.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Forest Prairie; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Forest Prairie has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about 0° in January. About 30 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Forest Prairie normally reaches 40° and falls to 22°. The record high is 74°, in 1990; the record low −6°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.70 in, fell in 1951.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1887 at Litchfield, 11 miles south-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
