The Lakota 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.
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
67° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1930. Next is 66° in 2001.
Lakota’s center stands about 1,530 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,490 ft to 1,540 ft, a difference of 50 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pierre Formation (shale), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million 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.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million 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.
Lakota 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 Lakota 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, 16 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
