The Fargo 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.
Showers likely
Showers likely
Partly cloudy; warmer
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
6° on Nov. 13, 2018, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1904. Next is 6° in 2019.
Fargo’s center stands about 2,110 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,060 ft to 2,270 ft, a difference of 210 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Terrace Deposits (coarse-detrital, fine-detrital), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 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 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.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pliocene, 2.6 to 5.3 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 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 Fargo reaches the Gulf of America by way of Boggy Creek, Wolf Creek, the North Canadian, the Canadian, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,510 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Canton Lake, Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
600 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Fargo; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Fargo has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. About 21 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Fargo normally reaches 62° and falls to 33°. The record high is 85°, in 2025; the record low 7°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.85 in, fell in 1947.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1904 at Gage Airport, 10 miles west-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
