The Hamilton 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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Partly cloudy; warmer
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−13° on Nov. 14, 1996, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1927. Next is −13° in 2005.
Hamilton’s center stands about 820 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 810 ft to 840 ft, a difference of 30 ft: nearly flat ground.
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: Jurassic, 145 to 202 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone, gypsum, anhydrite. Age: Jurassic, 145 to 202 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 0.2 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 Hamilton reaches Hudson Bay by way of Big Slough, the Tongue River, the Pembina, the Red River of the North and the Nelson: about 830 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.
Often dry. About 30% of the way is mapped as streams that run only after rain or snowmelt; the water makes the whole trip in floods.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Hamilton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Hamilton has a dry-winter warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 77° in July; winter nights fall to about −4° in January. A normal year brings about 39 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 20 inches of water.
On November 14 Hamilton normally reaches 34° and falls to 18°. The record high is 70°, in 1939; the record low −13°, in 1996. The most rain on this date, 2.03 in, fell in 1944.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1927 at Cavalier 7 NW, 12 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
