The Oshkosh 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.
Sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy; cooler
Showers likely
78° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1887. Next is 76° in 2001.
Oshkosh’s center stands about 1,120 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,090 ft to 1,180 ft, a difference of 90 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Undifferentiated (conglomerate, sandstone, mudstone), from the Late Cretaceous, 72 to 100 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 38×. 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 18 mi of the line.
Granitic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Orthogneiss. Age: Paleoarchean to Mesoarchean, 2.8 to 3.6 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gabbroic, dioritic. Age: Archean to Paleoproterozoic. About 2 mi of the line.
Orthogneiss, migmatite. Age: Paleoarchean to Mesoarchean, 2.8 to 3.6 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 Oshkosh reaches the Gulf of America by way of Lazarus Creek, the Lac qui Parle, the Minnesota and the Mississippi: about 2,170 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Pepin.
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 Oshkosh; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Oshkosh has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 5° in January. A normal year brings about 48 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 28 inches of water.
On November 14 Oshkosh normally reaches 43° and falls to 24°. The record high is 78°, in 1999; the record low −9°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.56 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1887 at Canby, 6 miles west-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
