The Northern 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
Mostly sunny
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
68° on Nov. 16, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1906. Next is 67° in 1953.
Northern’s center stands about 1,430 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,330 ft to 1,500 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Granitic intrusion, from the Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 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.
Granitic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 19 mi of the line.
Metabasalt, greenstone. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Granitic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 2 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 Northern reaches the Gulf of America by way of Lake Bemidji and the Mississippi: about 2,260 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Sugar Lake, Buck Lake, Lake Pepin and Lake Bemidji.
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 Northern; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Northern has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 79° in July; winter nights fall to about −4° in January. A normal year brings about 49 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 26 inches of water.
On November 14 Northern normally reaches 37° and falls to 20°. The record high is 66°, in 2016; the record low −13°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.05 in, fell in 1951.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1906 at Cass Lake, 16 miles southeast, 130 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
