The Moorhead 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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18° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1930. Next is 19° in 1940.
Moorhead’s center stands about 120 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 110 ft to 140 ft, a difference of 30 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (fine-detrital, coarse-detrital), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 years old.
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.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 24 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 Moorhead reaches the Gulf of America by way of Moorhead Bayou, the Big Sunflower, the Yazoo and the Mississippi: about 600 river miles.
450 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Moorhead; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Moorhead has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in August; winter nights fall to about 36° in January. About 57 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Moorhead normally reaches 64° and falls to 45°. The record high is 89°, in 1955; the record low 23°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 3.68 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1930 at Belzoni, 19 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
