The St. Peter 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.
76° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 73° in 2012.
St. Peter’s center stands about 890 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 730 ft to 1,010 ft, a difference of 280 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Klondike Hill, about 1,180 ft, 15 miles east-southeast.
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 54×. 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 14 mi of the line.
Dolostone, sandstone. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 9 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 St. Peter reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Minnesota and the Mississippi: about 1,910 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Pepin.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of St. Peter; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
St. Peter has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 3° in January. A normal year brings about 38 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 32 inches of water.
On November 14 St. Peter normally reaches 43° and falls to 23°. The record high is 76°, in 1999; the record low −8°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.50 in, fell in 1997.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at St. Peter, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.