Weather Data Disclaimer

The National Weather Service is the US government’s official source of weather watches, warnings and forecasts. When severe weather, flooding, fire, winter storms or tropical systems threaten, use:

• weather.gov and your local NWS forecast office;
• the National Hurricane Center for tropical storms and hurricanes;
• NOAA Weather Radio and Wireless Emergency Alerts on your phone;
• your local emergency management agency, and 911 in an emergency.

An alert may reach wxdeck late, or not at all. Never wait for wxdeck to tell you to take shelter or evacuate.

Most of what you see comes from NOAA, the National Weather Service and other agencies listed on the Credits page. We fetch it, then process it before showing it to you. Because of that, it may be:

• delayed — upstream publishing, our caches and your connection all add time, and a frame can be minutes or hours old;
• altered — radar and satellite are reprojected, resampled and recoloured; model fields are interpolated and contoured; forecasts from several models are blended;
• incomplete — sources go offline, regions fall outside a model’s or a radar network’s coverage, and alerts can lack their shapes;
• wrong — because of an error upstream or in our own processing.

What wxdeck shows is therefore not original, unaltered NOAA data, and it is not official government material.

A forecast is a computer model’s estimate of the future, and every model is sometimes badly wrong. wxdeck shows several models side by side and the spread between them because that disagreement is real uncertainty, not noise to be hidden. A blended number is still an estimate. Precipitation probabilities, timing and amounts are especially uncertain.

Snow totals are computed estimates. Snow depth is calculated from each model’s precipitation and temperature profile using the Kuchera snow-to-liquid ratio, which depends on the warmest temperature in the atmospheric column. Real ratios vary widely with temperature, wind and how the snow settles, so treat snow totals as a range, not a measurement.

The forecast blend, our implementation of the Kuchera ratio and every other method that combines or derives values are ours. They are not NOAA or National Weather Service products, and no agency has reviewed them.

Satellite imagery comes from NOAA NESDIS’s Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR). STAR says of its own website:

“While derived from operational satellites, the data, products, and imagery available on this website are intended for informational purposes only. This website is supported on a Monday-Friday basis, so outages may occur without notice and may not be immediately resolved. Neither the website nor the data displayed herein are considered operational, and should not be used to support operational observation, forecasting, emergency, or other disaster mitigation or response operations, either public or private.”

The same applies to the imagery on wxdeck, which is also reprojected and recoloured here. It may stop updating, especially on weekends.

wxdeck is an independent product operated by Jack Schulz, doing business as wxdeck. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by NOAA, the National Weather Service, NESDIS, the National Hurricane Center, any state department of transportation, or any other source we credit. Naming a source is attribution, not a claim of endorsement. We do not use NOAA or NWS logos.

Road cameras are loaded directly from the transportation agency that runs them and may be stale, frozen or pointed elsewhere. Station and buoy observations are what the instrument reported, which can include sensor errors. Check the timestamp on everything.