The Petersburg 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.
Petersburg’s center stands about 1,510 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,500 ft to 1,560 ft, a difference of 60 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.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 49×. 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 21 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 0.9 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 Petersburg reaches Hudson Bay by way of the North Branch Turtle, the Turtle, the Red River of the North and the Nelson: about 1,020 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 Petersburg; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Petersburg 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 Petersburg 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, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
