The city center is located just south of 45° N latitude. The city's lowest elevation of 686 ft (209 m) is near where Minnehaha Creek meets the Mississippi River. The site of the Prospect Park Water Tower is often cited as the city's highest pointand a placard in Deming Heights Park denotes the highest elevation, but a spot at 974 ft (296.8 m) in or near Waite Park in Northeast Minneapolis is corroborated by Google Earth as the highest ground.

Minneapolis has a continental climate typical of the Upper Midwestern United States. Winters can be cold and dry, while summer is comfortably warm although at times it can be hot and humid. On the Köppen climate classification, Minneapolis falls in the warm summer humid continental climate zone (Dfa). The city experiences a full range of precipitation and related weather events, including snow, sleet, ice, rain, thunderstorms, tornadoes, and fog. The warmest temperature ever recorded in Minneapolis was 108 °F (42.2 °C) in July 1936, and the coldest temperature ever recorded was -41 °F (-40.6 °C), in January 1888. The snowiest winter of record was 1983-84, when 98.4 in (2.5 m) of snow fell.

Because of its northerly location in the United States and lack of large bodies of water to moderate the air, Minneapolis is sometimes subjected to cold Arctic air masses, especially during late December, January & February. The average annual temperature of 45.4 °F (7 °C) gives the Minneapolis-St.Paul metropolitan area the coldest annual mean temperature of any major metropolitan area in the continental U.S.

The FBI released data Monday indicating that violent crime surged 35.5 percent in Minneapolis last year, but the city's Police Department said a computer glitch grossly exaggerated what was actually a 15 percent jump from 2004.

A 15 percent increase is still six times the 2.5 percent national rise in murders, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults in 2005, figures disclosed in preliminary data from the FBI's Uniform Crime Report. Still, the volume of violent crime in Minneapolis is about 30 percent below levels in the mid-1990s, when the number of annual murders nearly hit triple digits.

The city of Minneapolis, Minnesota is officially divided into eleven communities, each containing multiple official neighborhoods. It also contains numerous unofficial neighborhoods. Because of the way the city's streets are addressed, it is also informally divided into South, North, Southeast, and Northeast. Downtown and Southwest are also commonly thought of on the same level as these directional divisions.

Common conceptions of Minneapolis neighborhoods do not always align with official city maps, especially since much of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area's population now lives outside of the two major cities. Generalized names such as "North Minneapolis" are actually a combination of the Near North and Camden communities with each of these communities made up of several neighborhoods