The Sioux Falls 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
79° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 75° in 1953.
Sioux Falls’s center stands about 1,480 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,310 ft to 1,550 ft, a difference of 240 ft: 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 55×. 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 18 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 90 to 100 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Chert, shale, chalk. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 145 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 Sioux Falls reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Big Sioux, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,050 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 Sioux Falls; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sioux Falls has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 8° in January. A normal year brings about 45 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 28 inches of water.
On November 14 Sioux Falls normally reaches 46° and falls to 25°. The record high is 73°, in 2025; the record low −17°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.33 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 from the Sioux Falls Area threaded record (Sioux Falls Foss Field, 3 miles northwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
