The River Falls 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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Mostly cloudy; cooler
Chance of showers
69° on Nov. 17, 1953, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1913. Next is 65° in 1939.
River Falls’s center stands about 1,100 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,070 ft to 1,130 ft, a difference of 60 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Mafic metavolcanic rocks (metabasalt, greenstone), from the Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old.
The section below crosses 2 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.
Metabasalt, greenstone. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 22 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone, mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 100 million years old. About 3 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 River Falls reaches Hudson Bay by way of the Red Lake, the Red River of the North and the Nelson: about 1,060 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 River Falls; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
River Falls has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 79° in July; winter nights fall to about −3° in January. A normal year brings about 50 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 24 inches of water.
On November 14 River Falls normally reaches 36° and falls to 20°. The record high is 65°, in 1939; the record low −18°, in 1919. The most rain on this date, 1.65 in, fell in 1928.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1913 at Red Lake Falls, 10 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
