The Three Lakes 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.
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63° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1939. Next is 63° in 2023.
Three Lakes’s center stands about 1,670 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,620 ft to 1,710 ft, a difference of 90 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Granite-tonalite (granite, tonalite, gneiss), from the Paleoproterozoic, 1.8 to 1.9 billion years old.
The section below crosses 2 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.
Basalt, basaltic-andesite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 18 mi of the line.
Granite, tonalite, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.8 to 1.9 billion years old. About 6 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 Three Lakes reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Eagle, the Wisconsin and the Mississippi: about 2,020 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Petenwell Lake, Lake Wisconsin, Lake Du Bay and Rainbow Flowage.
1,610 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Three Lakes; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Three Lakes has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 78° in July; winter nights fall to about 2° in January. A normal year brings about 76 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 32 inches of water.
On November 14 Three Lakes normally reaches 39° and falls to 22°. The record high is 63°, in 1999; the record low 3°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.75 in, fell in 2000.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1939 at Eagle River, 9 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
