The Otter Tail 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.
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70° on Nov. 12, 2005, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1940. Next is 65° in 2001.
Otter Tail’s center stands about 1,330 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,310 ft to 1,400 ft, a difference of 90 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Black Peak, about 1,670 ft, 13 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Granite to granodiorite (granite, granodiorite), 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.
Tonalite, granodiorite, diorite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Metabasalt, greenstone. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Granite, granodiorite. 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 Otter Tail reaches Hudson Bay by way of Otter Tail Lake, the Otter Tail, the Red River of the North and the Nelson: about 1,280 river miles. Past the border it runs north through Canada to Hudson Bay.
Lakes on the way: Otter Tail Lake and Lake Winnipeg.
550 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 Otter Tail; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Otter Tail has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 79° in July; winter nights fall to about −2° in January. About 28 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Otter Tail normally reaches 37° and falls to 22°. The record high is 63°, in 1981; the record low 6°, in 1965. The most rain on this date, 0.47 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1940 at Ottertail, 3 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
