A Weatherkind forecast is assembled from public observation networks, numerical models, and terrain data. This page lists what we use, who maintains it, and the terms it carries.
Forecast models
Our forecast engine runs on raw model output rather than a redistributed forecast. Guidance comes from NOAA / National Weather Service — including the HRRR, NBM, and GFS systems — and from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) open data. NOAA output is a work of the United States government and in the public domain. ECMWF open data is published under CC BY 4.0 .
Observations
Surface conditions and our verification record are built from quality-controlled station observations: NWS/ASOS and AWOS via Iowa State's IEM archive, MADIS mesonet and HFMETAR feeds, SNOTEL from the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, and volunteer precipitation reports from CoCoRaHS. Air quality comes from the EPA AirNow program and its contributing state, local, and tribal agencies. Historical daily records come from NOAA GHCN-Daily and the Applied Climate Information System (ACIS).
Radar, satellite, and lightning
Precipitation structure and nowcasts use NOAA MRMS radar mosaics, GOES satellite imagery, and GOES GLM lightning observations. All are public domain works of the United States government.
Terrain and elevation
Weatherkind forecasts are terrain-aware, which means the shape of the ground is an input rather than a decoration. Elevation comes from the SRTM and Copernicus GLO-90 digital elevation models. Land and water boundaries come from the US Census Bureau TIGER files. Map tiles on this site are rendered from OpenFreeMap using OpenMapTiles schema data.
Place and summit names
Names for towns, summits, and other features in the United States come from the USGS Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), a public domain dataset from the U.S. Board on Geographic Names.
Ski area boundaries — which let us name the mountain above a resort rather than the highest ridge behind it — come from OpenStreetMap.
OpenStreetMap attribution
Ski area data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License (ODbL).
We derive a ski area index from that data. Under the ODbL's share-alike terms that derived database is offered back on the same licence, so anyone can take it:
Download the Weatherkind ski area index — gzipped TSV, ODbL 1.0.
This index is kept deliberately separate from every other dataset we publish. Nothing else on this page is derived from OpenStreetMap, and no other Weatherkind data carries the ODbL.
Corrections
If a source is credited incorrectly here, or a name we show is wrong, write to hello@weatherkind.com and we will fix it. Names sourced from GNIS and OpenStreetMap are best corrected upstream, where the fix reaches everyone who uses them.