The Grand Forks 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
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
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Chance of showers
66° on Nov. 15, 1939, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 66° in 2005.
Grand Forks’s center stands about 820 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 800 ft to 850 ft, a difference of 50 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Upper Ordovician (limestone, dolostone), from the Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million 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.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Granodiorite, diorite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Granite, granodiorite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 0.5 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 Grand Forks reaches Hudson Bay by way of the Red River of the North and the Nelson: about 940 river miles. Past the border it runs north through Canada to Hudson Bay.
Lake on the way: Lake Winnipeg.
400 miles of the trip are on the Nelson.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Grand Forks; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Grand Forks has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 80° in July; winter nights fall to about −1° in January. A normal year brings about 49 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 23 inches of water.
On November 14 Grand Forks normally reaches 36° and falls to 20°. The record high is 62°, in 2025; the record low −17°, in 1919. The most rain on this date, 1.09 in, fell in 1944.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Grand Forks University (Nws), 5 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
