The Onstad 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
67° on Nov. 17, 1953, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1890. Next is 66° in 2001.
Onstad’s center stands about 1,030 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 940 ft to 1,120 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Mafic to ultramafic hypabyssal intrusive complexes composed of gabbro, pyroxenite, diorite, and anorthosite, from the Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 54×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Gabbro, pyroxenite, diorite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Schist. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Tonalite, granodiorite, diorite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Metabasalt, greenstone. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Plutonic. Age: Archean. About 1 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone, mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 100 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. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
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 Onstad reaches Hudson Bay by way of Burnham Creek, the Red Lake, the Red River of the North and the Nelson: about 1,010 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 Onstad; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Onstad has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 80° in July; winter nights fall to about −4° in January. About 22 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Onstad normally reaches 37° and falls to 20°. The record high is 64°, in 2016; the record low −11°, in 1919. The most rain on this date, 0.89 in, fell in 1944.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1890 at Crookston Nw Experiment Sta, 17 miles northwest, 140 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
