The Claire City 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
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy; cooler
Showers likely
74° on Nov. 15, 1953, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1931. Next is 74° in 2001.
Claire City’s center stands about 1,200 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,180 ft to 1,230 ft, a difference of 50 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Carlile 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 21×. 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, bentonite. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 4 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 Claire City reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Little Minnesota, the Minnesota and the Mississippi: about 2,230 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Big Stone Lake and Lake Pepin.
1,750 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Claire City; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Claire City has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 4° in January. A normal year brings about 36 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 23 inches of water.
On November 14 Claire City normally reaches 42° and falls to 23°. The record high is 69°, in 1990; the record low −7°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.86 in, fell in 1947.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1931 from the Sisseton Area threaded record (Sisseton Municipal Airport, 14 miles south-southeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
