fog/west

A live loop of fog and low cloud along the entire West Coast — Washington, Oregon, and California — from NOAA's GOES-18 (GOES-West) satellite's Pacific U.S. scan. New frames arrive about every 5 minutes; the page refreshes itself. GeoColor shows natural color by day and infrared at night; IR is the 3.9 µm shortwave band forecasters use to find fog in the dark.

Airports show live visibility from official aviation weather reports — dots are colored by flight category from the live report — VFR, MVFR, IFR, LIFR (ceiling and visibility combined, standard aviation thresholds). Tap one for the full report. Webcams are ridge-top sky cameras from the ALERTCalifornia / ALERTWest network — each icon is a wedge rotated to the camera's live pointing direction (zooming in reveals more cameras) — mountaintop views over the marine layer and valley fog — tinted by the visibility at the nearest reporting airport; tap for the live image.

Imagery engine: frames stream as map tiles from CIRA's SLIDER service — only the pixels in your viewport download, at the resolution your zoom needs, up to the satellite's native ½ km. Zoom in while the loop plays and it sharpens automatically; replay reaches as far back as the tile archive holds (typically ~2–3 weeks). If the tile service is unreachable, the app falls back to NOAA's whole-frame feed.

fire/west: the Fire view switches the imagery to the Fire Temperature RGB (hotspots glow through smoke), and the 🔥 layer overlays official NIFC/WFIGS incidents — flame size by acreage, red = active, amber = mostly contained — with fire perimeters outlined where published. Tap a flame for acres, containment, and discovery date. Smoke itself is visible directly in GeoColor imagery.

Resolution: the tile engine streams whatever your zoom needs automatically, up to ½ km. If the app ever falls back to the legacy whole-frame feed, that loop runs at 1 km with pause-to-sharpen up to ½ km.

Outlook switches the timeline to the next 18 hours and paints a forecast fog picture on the map: bright white where NOAA's short-range models (HRRR/GFS, via Open-Meteo, CC BY 4.0) predict surface fog, and a soft gray wash where they predict the marine-layer / low-stratus deck. Drag the timeline to watch tonight's fog form and burn off before it happens. Airport dots recolor to the official NWS terminal-forecast (TAF) visibility as an independent cross-check, with an "FG" tag where fog is explicitly forecast — TAFs are only issued for larger fields, so some airports show gray. Forecasts are models, not measurements. The map-lines toggle draws state and coast boundaries over the raw satellite tiles (they're not baked into the imagery) in both WEST and USA views. In outlook, the play button animates the forecast — the fog field sweeps through the next 18 hours on a clean vector map. Current pins the single newest frame — no playback, auto-advancing as new scans publish, rendered at the sharpest tile level your zoom allows. Replay re-runs actual imagery from NOAA's rolling archive (roughly the last 2–3 days) — pick a day and start hour. The SAT switch swaps between GOES-West's Pacific view (sharpest over the coast) and GOES-East's whole-country view; the two satellites photograph from different points in space, so each is shown in its own true perspective.

pinch / scroll · zoom   drag · pan
double-tap · zoom in / out   tap map · hide / show controls
space · play / pause   ← → · step frames

Imagery: NOAA / NESDIS & CIRA SLIDER tiles (GeoColor by CIRA & NOAA). Fire data: NIFC WFIGS. Weather: National Weather Service. Cameras: Shelter Cove airport & headlands cams by NorthCoastAviation / Inn of the Lost Coast, and ridge-top sky cams from ALERTCalifornia | UC San Diego via ALERTWest (many PG&E-sponsored) — mountaintop views that show the fog deck from above. Informational only — not for navigation, aviation, or safety-of-life use. A West Coast homage to fog.today.