ABOUT WHY THIS EXISTS · WHERE THE DATA COMES FROM
The why

One page for everything I check before heading outside.

The Bay Area runs on microclimates. It can be socked in and 55° at Ocean Beach while it's sunny and 80° a few miles inland, and which side of the fog you end up on can make or break a hike, a paddle, a ride, or a day at the beach. Figuring out what's actually happening meant bouncing between a half-dozen tabs — a satellite loop here, a webcam there, the NWS grid forecast, a wind map — every single time.

This site is my attempt to pull all of that into one place: the sources I already trusted, stitched together so I can read the coast-vs-inland split and the state of the marine layer at a glance before planning an outdoor day.

It was inspired first and foremost by fog.today — a gorgeously simple satellite fog tracker that I found genuinely useful and kept coming back to. The webcam and live-conditions side owes just as much to Doug Kunst's wonderful Mt. Tam Cam page, a long-running labor of love that taught me how much you can read off a wall of well-chosen cameras. Microclimates is my way of bringing those instincts together with the forecast data, by neighborhood, in one read.

Data & Attribution

Everything here is pulled live from its original public source

Microclimates is a thin layer over other people's excellent data. It collects, aligns, and re-presents — it doesn't originate observations or forecasts. Full credit for the underlying data belongs to the organizations below; please refer to each source for its own terms of use.

National Weather Service Forecasts · gridpoints

All temperature, cloud-cover, wind, humidity, and precipitation numbers — on the landing page, the per-neighborhood page, and the coast/inland panels — come from the NWS public API (api.weather.gov), Bay Area forecast office MTR (Monterey/San Francisco). The forecasts are issued on a ~2.5 km grid; this site area-weights those cells onto neighborhood boundaries but does not add resolution. A product of NOAA / the National Weather Service.

GOES-18 via RealEarth Satellite fog

The satellite fog tiles and the brightness archive behind the fog tracker are GOES-18 (GOES-West) imagery served by RealEarth, operated by the Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The underlying satellite is operated by NOAA and NASA.

DataSF — Analysis Neighborhoods Boundaries

The 41 San Francisco neighborhood polygons on the neighborhoods page are the official "Analysis Neighborhoods" boundaries published by DataSF, the City and County of San Francisco's open-data program.

OpenStreetMap & CARTO Base map

The neighborhood map's base tiles are © OpenStreetMap contributors, styled and served by CARTO. Map rendering by Leaflet.

ALERTCalifornia Fire-lookout cams

The high mountaintop cameras — Mt. Tam (East/West), Mt. Diablo, Vollmer Peak, Round Top, Loma Prieta, Big Rock Ridge — are public fire-detection cameras from ALERTCalifornia, a UC San Diego program, in partnership with CAL FIRE.

Local broadcast cameras Webcams

Several city and bay cameras are public live feeds from local stations: ABC7 / KGO-TV (Ferry Building, Bay Bridge, Treasure Island, Mt. Tam, Emeryville), KTVU FOX 2 (Oakland Estuary), and CBS SF. The ABC7/KGO weather panels also surface forecasts powered by AccuWeather.

Community & institutional cams Webcams

The coast and bay are covered by a number of independent and institutional cameras: Fellow Feathers (the Fort Funston cam, also used as the landing-page coast cam), PacificaView (Sharp Park beach cams), the St. Francis Yacht Club (Crissy Field), Boardsports California, Surfline, the National Park Service, the Salesforce Tower cameras, and feeds delivered via IPCamLive and YouTube Live.

Ventusky Wind

The interactive wind-gust map on the weather page is embedded from Ventusky (InMeteo).

If you own one of these feeds and would prefer it not be embedded here, or notice an attribution that needs correcting, please get in touch and I'll fix it right away.