Weather and park conditions
Weather and park conditions in Parks Manager come from three feeds: the forecast for each park on a trip from Open-Meteo, closures and hazards from the National Park Service alerts feed, and watches and warnings from the National Weather Service.
A closed road found on the morning you meant to drive it is the most common way a park trip goes wrong, so these are pushed by email rather than left on a page you would have to remember to open.
- 3live data feeds
- 6kinds of pre-trip email
- 30 minutespark conditions cache
- 14 dayswindow for new-alert emails
Three feeds, three different jobs
Weather tells you what to pack. Park conditions tell you whether the road you planned around is open. Severe-weather warnings tell you to change the plan today. Mixing them into one notification stream would bury the third behind the first.
Park conditions are cached for 30 minutes in the database, so a trip with six parks on it costs the National Park Service a handful of requests rather than one per page view.
| Feed | Covers | Answers |
|---|---|---|
| Open-Meteo | Every park in the catalog | What the weather will do |
| National Park Service alerts | United States parks | Closures, fire bans, and hazards published by the park |
| National Weather Service | United States parks | Flash flood, tornado, fire weather, and blizzard watches and warnings |
What arrives, and when
Six messages can go out around a trip, each triggered by a different condition rather than by a digest schedule. A quiet trip generates almost none of them, which is the intent — a weekly summary that is usually empty stops being read.
| When | What it carries |
|---|---|
| 30 days before | Trip dates, parks, outstanding questions, and booking deadlines still open. |
| 7 days before | The same, plus pack-list progress and a prompt to buy missing gear while there is time. |
| 7 days before | A digest of current National Park Service conditions for every park on the trip. Skipped entirely when no park has an alert. |
| Trip within 14 days, or under way | New park conditions as the park publishes them, deduplicated so one alert is emailed once. |
| Any time before or during | New National Weather Service watches and warnings for parks on the trip. |
| The night before | The latest forecast, the latest park conditions, and the night-sky schedule, each stamped with the time it was fetched. |
Why everything carries a fetched-at time
A forecast with no timestamp is a trap. Read at breakfast it looks current, and by the time it matters it may be twelve hours stale and describing a different day.
Every conditions block and every forecast Parks Manager emails or renders says when it was pulled, so a number that has gone stale looks stale instead of looking authoritative.
Trips without exact dates are skipped
A trip can be dated to a year, a month, or an exact day. Weather and condition emails only fire for exact dates, because "sometime in August" has no forecast and a reminder pinned to a guessed day is worse than no reminder.
Set the days on a trip and the emails start; leave it as a rough plan and it stays quiet.
What it does not do
Coverage outside the United States is thin, and it is thin for a structural reason.
- National Park Service alerts and National Weather Service warnings are United States feeds. A park in Croatia or Mexico gets the Open-Meteo forecast and nothing else.
- Parks Manager republishes what those agencies publish. A closure the park has not posted yet does not exist as far as this feature is concerned.
- There is no air quality, wildfire smoke, or ultraviolet index.
- Published visitor-center hours are cached for 6 hours and are what the park listed, not a promise the door will be open.
- Nothing here is a substitute for the official park page on the morning you travel.
Common questions
Does Parks Manager tell me when a park road closes?
It emails new National Park Service alerts for parks on a trip once that trip is within 14 days or under way, and shows the same alerts on the park page. It republishes what the park publishes, so a closure the park has not posted yet will not appear.
What weather data does Parks Manager use?
Open-Meteo for the forecast at every park in the catalog, plus National Weather Service watches and warnings for United States parks.
Do international parks get weather alerts?
They get the Open-Meteo forecast. Severe-weather warnings and park condition alerts come from United States federal feeds, so parks in Canada, Mexico, and Europe have neither.
When does the night-before email arrive?
On the calendar day before a planned or booked trip starts, carrying the latest forecast, current park conditions, and the night-sky schedule, each stamped with the time it was fetched.
All Parks Manager features are indexed in one place.