The Princeton 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
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
74° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1959. Next is 69° in 1990.
Princeton’s center stands about 980 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 950 ft to 1,020 ft, a difference of 70 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Granitic to granodioritic orthogneiss, from the Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old.
The section below crosses 8 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.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Middle Cambrian to Cambrian, 487 to 521 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Mylonite, gneiss, schist. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Orthogneiss. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Volcanic, sedimentary, hypabyssal. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Siltstone, graywacke, slate. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 2 smaller units 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 Princeton reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Rum and the Mississippi: about 1,930 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Pepin.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Princeton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Princeton has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° 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 31 inches of water.
On November 14 Princeton normally reaches 41° and falls to 24°. The record high is 69°, in 1990; the record low −3°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.52 in, fell in 2010.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1959 at Santiago 3 E, 8 miles west. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
