The Thompson 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. 15, 1939, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 66° in 2005.
Thompson’s center stands about 870 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 850 ft to 890 ft, a difference of 40 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Winnipeg Group (shale, sandstone), from the Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 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, sandstone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Granitic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Age: Precambrian. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Metabasalt, greenstone. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion 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. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
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 Thompson reaches Hudson Bay by way of the Elm Coulee, Cole Creek, the Red River of the North and the Nelson: about 960 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 Thompson; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Thompson has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 80° in July; winter nights fall to about −1° in January. A normal year brings about 49 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 23 inches of water.
On November 14 Thompson normally reaches 36° and falls to 20°. The record high is 62°, in 2025; the record low −17°, in 1919. The most rain on this date, 1.09 in, fell in 1944.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Grand Forks University (Nws), 10 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
