About
The forecast tells you what the weather will be. It doesn't tell you when to paint the fence.
Venturing Outside starts from the thing you want to do — a ride, a run, painting, people over, the washing, the dog, the stars — and reads the week ahead hour by hour for your town. Each activity has its own idea of good weather, written down under the grid so you can argue with it. You get the best three windows with the reason, the whole week as a colour grid, and a row of things a normal forecast never mentions: frost tonight, the air, when to open the windows, the sun on your panels, the dark-sky nights, the tides.
How it decides
- Every hour is scored good, nearly or no against the activity's rules. Nearly means exactly one rule is slightly over — a touch too windy, a degree too cold.
- Windows are the longest runs of good-or-nearly hours in a day, at least as long as you asked for; the best per day are ranked and the top three shown.
- With everyone at once, an hour has to be good for every activity you picked.
- My own activity lets you set your own limits. They live in your browser.
Where the numbers come from
- Forecast, air quality and sea level: Open-Meteo, a free open weather service. Pollen is only available in Europe, so elsewhere the page says so instead of guessing.
- Weather alerts: the US National Weather Service. US only.
- Drive times: OSRM on OpenStreetMap. Typical times with no traffic — always says so.
- ISS passes: orbital elements from CelesTrak, computed here in your browser.
- Frost dates: the last five years of daily lows for your spot, from Open-Meteo's archive.
- Moon phase and moon times: computed here, no data needed.
What it isn't
A forecast more than three days out is a guess that gets better each day — check again before you buy the sausages. Tides are modelled sea level for the nearest open water, fine for planning and not for a boat. The ISS times are good to a minute or so. There is no AI in any of it, on purpose: the rules are arithmetic you can read.
Who made it
Eamon Wyse, as a cyber-wyse project. Single page, no account, no backend, MIT. The source is the page.