The Souris 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
66° on Nov. 13, 1981, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 65° in 2001.
Souris’s center stands about 1,510 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,490 ft to 1,590 ft, a difference of 100 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Boundary Butte, about 2,540 ft, 13 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Fox Hills Formation (shale, sandstone), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 18×. 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, sandstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, claystone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 0.6 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 Souris reaches Hudson Bay by way of Boundary Creek, the Souris, the Assiniboine, the Red River of the North and the Nelson: about 1,010 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 70% 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 Souris; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Souris 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 50 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 19 inches of water.
On November 14 Souris normally reaches 35° and falls to 16°. The record high is 61°, in 1981; the record low −21°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.68 in, fell in 2005.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Bottineau, 12 miles east-southeast, 110 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
