The Moorhead 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
Mostly sunny
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
Mostly cloudy; cooler
Chance of showers
73° on Nov. 17, 1953, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1881. Next is 68° in 1934.
Moorhead’s center stands about 910 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 900 ft to 920 ft, a difference of 20 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Mafic metavolcanic rocks (metabasalt, greenstone), from the Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 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.
Metabasalt, greenstone. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Granitic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Age: Precambrian. 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 Moorhead reaches Hudson Bay by way of the Red River of the North and the Nelson: about 1,100 river miles. Past the border it runs north through Canada to Hudson Bay.
Lake on the way: Lake Winnipeg.
460 miles of the trip are on the Red River of the North.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Moorhead; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Moorhead has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 0° in January. A normal year brings about 51 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 24 inches of water.
On November 14 Moorhead normally reaches 39° and falls to 22°. The record high is 66°, in 1939; the record low −9°, in 1919. The most rain on this date, 1.26 in, fell in 1909.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1881 from the Fargo Area threaded record (Fargo Hector International Airport, 8 miles north-northwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
