ABOUT

Golden State Weather is organised by terrain, because in California terrain is what makes the weather — a range lifting air, a gap accelerating it, a basin trapping it, an escarpment drying it. It answers "why is here like this at all", with 57 named NOAA stations and their 1991–2020 normals.

This site is organised by time. It answers "what has changed, and what is likely to". Those turn out to need a different dataset entirely: a 30-year normal has no time axis, so it cannot have a trend, and the 131-year divisional record that can have one throws away the terrain detail the other site exists to show. Two datasets, two questions, two sites — rather than one site quietly averaging them together.

What they share is everything else: the same design system, the same seven climate divisions, the same rule that geography is authored and climate is measured, and the same build discipline in which a number in the prose that stops matching the number in the data fails the deploy rather than reaching a reader.

The components, the typography, the warm paper ground and the signage layout are shared with the whole Forecast Network, so a reader who can use one of these sites can use all of them. What changes here is the identity. The weather site is California Poppy — a forecast colour, warm and present-tense. This one is deep indigo, the register of an archive, with brass for the mark.

The mark itself is the state outline filled by the state's own temperature record: one vertical stripe per year from 1895 on the left to the last complete year on the right, in the same California Albers projection the weather site draws. It is generated by a script rather than drawn, which means it cannot fall out of date with the data it claims to show — adding a year to the record adds a stripe to the logo.

Not a forecast service, not a drought monitor, not a live observation feed, and not an attribution study. The method page lists the limits in full and names the organisations that do each of those jobs properly. Every one of them publishes for free, and this site links to them rather than approximating them.

Golden State Climate is an independent site. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by NOAA, NCEI, the Climate Prediction Center, the National Weather Service, the California Department of Water Resources or any other agency. It uses their published open data, which it names and links on every page that draws on it.

Companion to Golden State Weather. Part of the Forecast Network with Weather.city, Forecast Eagle, Forecast Canada and Forecast Waves.