The Fairmount 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.
Sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
Partly cloudy; cooler
Showers likely
68° on Nov. 13, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1939. Next is 67° in 1939.
Fairmount’s center stands about 990 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 960 ft to 990 ft, a difference of 30 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Precambrian Rocks, from the Precambrian.
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 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.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone, mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 100 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Age: Precambrian. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Metabasalt, greenstone. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion 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 Fairmount reaches Hudson Bay by way of the Bois de Sioux, the Red River of the North and the Nelson: about 1,220 river miles. Past the border it runs north through Canada to Hudson Bay.
Lake on the way: Lake Winnipeg.
550 miles of the trip are on the Red River of the North.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Fairmount; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Fairmount has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 1° in January. A normal year brings about 36 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 24 inches of water.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1939 at White Rock Dam, 13 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
