Where the weather comes from
Forecasts come from Xweather or from public weather models, maps and routes from Mapbox, and radar from public weather services. The sections, the ratings and the briefing’s facts are worked out by Windshield Weather.
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Forecasts
Forecasts along your drive come from Xweather, from Vaisala. For some accounts and places, they come instead from public weather models that Windshield Weather processes itself. Either way, each point along the route is asked for its forecast at its own time — the moment you will be there — and the answer includes the condition, temperature, feels like, wind and gusts, precipitation and its chance, visibility, humidity and cloud cover.
The public models, each where it covers:
| Where | Model |
|---|---|
| United States, southern Canada and Alaska | NOAA National Blend of Models |
| Canada | Environment and Climate Change Canada HRDPS |
| Europe | Deutscher Wetterdienst ICON-EU, used under CC BY 4.0 |
| France and north-west Europe | Danish Meteorological Institute HARMONIE DINI, used under CC BY 4.0 |
| Southern Brazil and the Southern Cone | Servicio Meteorológico Nacional (Argentina) WRF 4 km, used under CC BY 2.5 AR |
| Everywhere | NOAA Global Forecast System; ECMWF IFS open data, used under CC BY 4.0; and Environment and Climate Change Canada GDPS for the UV index |
Any part of a route the public models cannot answer is forecast by Xweather. NOAA does not endorse Windshield Weather.
The nearest place name for each section comes from Xweather, or from GeoNames, used under CC BY 4.0, where the public models answer.
The app reuses a forecast for up to an hour.
Maps, routes and search
Mapbox draws the map and finds places when you search. It also works out the route and how long each part of it takes to drive, allowing for expected traffic at your departure time.
Radar
The radar layer is drawn from public weather services, each where it covers best:
| Where | Source |
|---|---|
| United States, Alaska, Hawaii, the Caribbean and Guam | NOAA MRMS radar |
| Europe | EUMETNET OPERA radar composite, used under CC BY 4.0 |
| Elsewhere | NOAA NESDIS rainfall estimate from satellites |
| Where nothing is observed | NOAA GFS forecast model |
Radar shows what has fallen; it does not feed the forecast or the ratings.
Official alerts
Official alerts come from the US National Weather Service, part of NOAA, as it issues them: public domain, credited as “Source: NOAA National Weather Service”. They sit beside the forecast and never change its ratings. Official alerts has more.
Worked out by Windshield Weather
- Sections — how the road is divided, from the forecast along it.
- Ratings — the severity of each section, from the kind of weather forecast. See Severity.
- Daylight — sunrise, sunset, dawn and dusk along the moving drive, from the sun’s position, using NOAA’s solar calculations.
- Time zones — where the clock changes, from the time-zone boundaries of the timezone-boundary-builder project, © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database License.
The briefing
Every fact in the briefing is worked out by Windshield Weather from the forecast. The words are written by a large language model hosted on Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, and read aloud by two synthetic voices from ElevenLabs. Neither receives your coordinates or who you are.
Where the app says so
On a drive, View sources at the foot of the timeline names the sources for that drive. Settings › About lists them too. Both credit each public model and GeoNames in the words its licence asks for. On iPhone, iPad, Mac and the web, About also lists each radar source, EUMETNET OPERA’s CC BY 4.0 included.
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