The Monroe 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
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy; cooler
Showers likely
−21° on Nov. 14, 1959, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is −8° in 1955.
Monroe’s center stands about 1,500 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,360 ft to 1,530 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Sioux Quartzite, from the Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion 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 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.
Quartzite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Chalk, marlstone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Chert, shale, chalk. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 7 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 Monroe reaches the Gulf of America by way of the East Fork Vermillion, the Vermillion, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,040 river miles.
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 Monroe; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Monroe has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 8° in January. About 28 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Monroe normally reaches 45° and falls to 24°. The record high is 76°, in 1953; the record low −21°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.31 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Bridgewater, 15 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
