The McIntosh 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
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
74° on Nov. 13, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1915. Next is 73° in 1953.
McIntosh’s center stands about 2,300 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,170 ft to 2,450 ft, a difference of 280 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ludlow Formation (sandstone), from the Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 36×. 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 9 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, claystone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Siltstone, claystone, sandstone. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 1 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 McIntosh reaches the Gulf of America by way of Stink Creek, the Grand River, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,450 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Oahe, Lake Sharpe, Lake Francis Case and Lewis and Clark Lake.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of McIntosh; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
McIntosh has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 7° in January. A normal year brings about 43 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 17 inches of water.
On November 14 McIntosh normally reaches 42° and falls to 22°. The record high is 72°, in 1939; the record low −15°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.49 in, fell in 2003.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1915 at Mc Intosh 6 SE, 7 miles south-southeast, 120 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
