The Otter Tail Peninsula 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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67° on Nov. 17, 1953, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1887. Next is 64° in 1913.
Otter Tail Peninsula’s center stands about 1,360 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,280 ft to 1,410 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Calc-alkalic volcanic and volcaniclastic rocks (alkalic-volcanic), 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.
Alkalic-volcanic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Granitic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Granite, granodiorite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion 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.
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 Peninsula reaches the Gulf of America by way of Leech Lake, the Leech Lake and the Mississippi: about 2,230 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Leech Lake and 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 Otter Tail Peninsula; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Otter Tail Peninsula has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 80° in July; winter nights fall to about −2° in January. A normal year brings about 48 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 27 inches of water.
On November 14 Otter Tail Peninsula normally reaches 37° and falls to 22°. The record high is 62°, in 1939; the record low −5°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.30 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1887 at Leech Lake, 9 miles east-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
