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ABOUT THIS SITE

What it is, where the numbers come from, and what it will not do.

What it is

Golden State Weather is a reference for California's weather, climate and geography, organised around the idea that in this state the three are the same subject. Almost every distinctive thing about California weather is terrain acting on moving air, so the site is built terrain-first: eighteen regions, the ranges between them, the passes through those ranges, and then the places and the normals hung off that structure.

It is deliberately not a forecast site. There is no seven-day strip, no radar loop and no current conditions, because those are well served elsewhere and because the thing that is not well served is the explanation of why California's weather behaves the way it does at all.

Status

AreaState
Site, TLS, deploylive
Design system (shared with the network, own colour + mark)live
Region atlas — 18 regionslive
Places — 57, with NOAA 1991–2020 normalslive
Ranges, peaks and passeslive
Wind, water, climate and fire explainerslive
California Albers map, drawn in-browserlive
Freemium gating and 30-minute previewlive — client-side only, see below
Accounts, billing, server-side entitlementnot started
Model imagery and forecast layersnot started
Live observations and current conditionsnot planned

Where the numbers come from

AND HOW THEY ARE CHECKED

Climate normals

NOAA/NCEI Monthly Climate Normals, 1991–2020, fetched per station from the published product. Every place page names the station its numbers came from, its ID, its elevation and how far it is from the town — because a normal is a property of a gauge, and a page that shows one without naming it is asking to be trusted rather than checked.

Station matching is elevation-aware

Nearest-station matching is wrong often enough in California to poison a table: Mount Wilson and Pasadena are eight miles apart and 4,900 feet apart. The matcher charges for vertical distance as well as horizontal and rejects anything more than 1,200 feet off, and where a place is defined by one specific record — Blue Canyon, Bishop Airport — the station is named explicitly.

No hand-typed temperatures

The geography tables are authored; the climate numbers are not. An earlier draft did hand-author January and July figures, and reconciling them against NCEI found 66 materially wrong. Those columns were deleted rather than corrected, and the site now joins geography to measured data at render time.

Geography

The boundary is public-domain state-boundary data, projected into California Albers (EPSG:3310) — the equal-area conic the state's own agencies use. Web Mercator would stretch the north of the state about 12% relative to the south, which on a site whose argument is geography would be a poor opening.

Regions, ranges and passes

Authored for this site, on meteorological grounds, and cross-checked at build time: a region naming a forecast office that does not exist, a city outside its own region's bounds, or a pass crossing a range that is not in the table all fail the build rather than rendering an empty panel.

The prose

Written for this site. Where it states a number — Bishop's five inches, Death Valley's 134°F, the 84 miles between Whitney and Badwater — that number is either in the data tables or is a widely published figure. It is a reference, not a paper; treat it accordingly.

How it is built

Static HTML and ES modules, served by Caddy from this host. No framework, no build step, and nothing loaded from another domain — the typography, the map and the data are all served from here, so no cookie banner is needed because there is nothing to consent to. A strict Content-Security-Policy enforces that rather than merely describing it, which is why the CDN's own injected analytics beacon does not load either. The map is hand-rolled inline SVG rather than a tile viewer: the subject is one fixed state at one scale, and 4 kB of code renders it before first paint, prints, and is readable by a screen reader.

Pages are checked in a real browser before deploy, and the checks are geometric rather than structural — the interesting failure here is a page that loads perfectly and draws California in the wrong place, which no DOM assertion catches.

What it will not do

Issue warnings This is not a warning service and never will be. Watches, warnings and evacuation orders come from the National Weather Service, CAL FIRE and county emergency offices — every region page links its own. SAFETY Gate safety information Fire weather, storm hazards and official links are free permanently. The capability table marks them, and the code throws if anything tries to lock one — so the failure is a broken build, not a shipped paywall. ENFORCED IN CODE Track you No cookies, and nothing loaded from another domain. Cloudflare injects an analytics beacon at the edge; the site's Content-Security-Policy blocks it from loading, so it never runs. Two localStorage keys hold your tier and your preview expiry, both listed in full on the account page. PRIVACY Pretend the paywall is secure Entitlement is currently checked in your browser. That is a courtesy fence, not a security boundary, and it is said here, on the Pro page, and in the source rather than left to be discovered. HONESTY

Part of the Forecast Network

Forecast Eagle covers North America from NOAA sources, Forecast Canada covers Canada from MSC, Forecast California carries the state's model guidance, and Forecast Waves draws the sea state by basin. They share a design system, self-hosted Overpass, and a rule about not making a picture say more than the data supports. Golden State Weather is the one aimed at a single state, and the one with a paid tier.