The Rockford 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; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
71° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1977. Next is 70° in 1999.
Rockford’s center stands about 920 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 900 ft to 1,060 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Upper Cambrian (sandstone, siltstone, shale), from the Cambrian, 487 to 497 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 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: Cambrian, 487 to 497 million years old. About 18 mi of the line.
Claystone, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 113 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Middle Cambrian to Cambrian, 487 to 521 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone, sandstone. Age: Middle Ordovician to Late Ordovician, 445 to 471 million years old. About 0.8 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 Rockford reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Crow and the Mississippi: about 1,880 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Pepin.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Rockford; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Rockford has a cold desert climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 4° in January. Barely 0.0 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Rockford normally reaches 42° and falls to 25°. The record high is 68°, in 1990; the record low 3°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.75 in, fell in 1996.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1977 at Delano, 4 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
