The Prairie Lake 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.
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
3.07 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1982. The next wettest, 2.53 inches, fell in 1996.
Prairie Lake’s center stands about 1,140 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,030 ft to 1,260 ft, a difference of 230 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Cambrian, undivided (sandstone), from the Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 60×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 24 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 Prairie Lake reaches the Gulf of America by way of Brown Creek, the Red Cedar, the Chippewa and the Mississippi: about 1,840 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Prairie Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Prairie Lake has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 2° in January. A normal year brings about 52 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 31 inches of water.
On November 14 Prairie Lake normally reaches 41° and falls to 24°. The record high is 69°, in 1999; the record low 3°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.65 in, fell in 2010.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1982 at Rice Lake, 6 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
