The Vasa 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 sunny; warmer
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Showers likely
5° on Nov. 15, 2014, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 5° in 2019.
Vasa’s center stands about 1,060 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 760 ft to 1,120 ft, a difference of 360 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Lower Ordovician (dolostone, sandstone), from the Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million 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 34×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Dolostone, sandstone. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 497 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 2 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Middle Cambrian to Cambrian, 487 to 521 million years old. About 1 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 Vasa reaches the Gulf of America by way of Belle Creek, the Cannon and the Mississippi: about 1,790 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Pepin.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Vasa; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Vasa has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 6° in January. About 32 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Vasa normally reaches 43° and falls to 27°. The record high is 69°, in 1999; the record low 8°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.98 in, fell in 1951.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Red Wing Dam 3, 9 miles northeast, 380 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
