The Swan Lake 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.
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
74° on Nov. 17, 1953, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1885. Next is 71° in 1954.
Swan Lake’s center stands about 1,200 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,100 ft to 1,250 ft, a difference of 150 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Tower Hill, about 1,600 ft, 14 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Schist and tonalitic to granodioritic paragneiss (schist, paragneiss), 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 61×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Schist, paragneiss. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 19 mi of the line.
Schist. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 5 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 Swan Lake reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Pomme de Terre, the Minnesota and the Mississippi: about 2,190 river miles.
Lake on the way: 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 Swan Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Swan Lake has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about 1° in January. A normal year brings about 45 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 27 inches of water.
On November 14 Swan Lake normally reaches 40° and falls to 22°. The record high is 69°, in 1999; the record low −10°, in 1932. The most rain on this date, 0.80 in, fell in 1909.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1885 at Morris West Central Research And Outreach Center, 8 miles south-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
