The Dahlen 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
Partly cloudy
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Chance of showers
67° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1930. Next is 66° in 2001.
Dahlen’s center stands about 1,420 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,270 ft to 1,500 ft, a difference of 230 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pierre Formation (shale), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 37×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 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 Dahlen reaches Hudson Bay by way of the South Branch Forest, the Forest, the Red River of the North and the Nelson: about 970 river miles. Past the border it runs north through Canada to Hudson Bay.
Lake on the way: Lake Winnipeg.
400 miles of the trip are on the Nelson.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Dahlen; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Dahlen has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 79° in July; winter nights fall to about −4° in January. A normal year brings about 42 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 20 inches of water.
On November 14 Dahlen normally reaches 35° and falls to 18°. The record high is 65°, in 1953; the record low −10°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.97 in, fell in 1944.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1930 at Petersburg 2 N, 9 miles south-southwest, 110 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
