The Tara 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
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
−12° on Nov. 12, 1966, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1945. Next is −8° in 1959.
Tara’s center stands about 1,090 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,030 ft to 1,140 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Amphibolitic to dioritic gneiss (orthogneiss), from the Paleoarchean to Mesoarchean, 2.8 to 3.6 billion years old.
The section below crosses 6 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.
Conglomerate, sandstone, mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 100 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Orthogneiss. Age: Paleoarchean to Mesoarchean, 2.8 to 3.6 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Orthogneiss. Age: Paleoarchean to Mesoarchean, 2.8 to 3.6 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Orthogneiss, migmatite. Age: Paleoarchean to Mesoarchean, 2.8 to 3.6 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Leucocratic-granitic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.8 to 2 billion years old. About 0.4 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 Tara reaches the Gulf of America by way of Cottonwood Creek, the Chippewa, the Minnesota and the Mississippi: about 2,140 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 Tara; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Tara has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 1° in January. A normal year brings about 43 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 28 inches of water.
On November 14 Tara normally reaches 42° and falls to 22°. The record high is 69°, in 1990; the record low −5°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.40 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1945 at Benson, 9 miles east-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
