Every number has a source.

Collection and source authority

Resort operating information comes from resort reports. Weather forecasts come from the National Weather Service. Buoy observations come from NOAA NDBC; tide predictions come from NOAA CO-OPS. A source can be authoritative for one kind of information without being authoritative for another.

Checks run when a visitor opens the conditions desk or selects “Check sources,” and are limited to once an hour. This is not continuous monitoring. Where a source restricts automated access or its format has not been validated, we leave collection disabled and link to the original.

Validation before publication

Parsers extract supported fields and reject invalid ranges, impossible terrain totals, unsupported feed formats, and contradictory season-closure counts. Missing fields remain unknown. A failed check retains the previous successful capture with its original date and a visible failure notice.

Freshness

Snow reports more than 24 hours old are marked stale. Season-end reports remain historical references, regardless of when we retrieved them. Buoy observations more than three hours old are marked stale. Reports without a usable source timestamp are marked undated. Forecasts and tides are displayed only for their applicable future periods.

These thresholds are our display rules, not guarantees of field conditions. A recent report can become inaccurate before the next update.

Observation, forecast, and interpretation

Operator reports describe what a resort publishes. Buoy values are measurements at the named station. Weather forecasts and tide predictions describe expected future conditions. We do not convert offshore wave height into beach-breaking wave height, infer lift status from weather, or label a destination safe from these inputs.

Changes and history

Each stored capture records its source URL, source time when supplied, collection time, parser version, and a content hash. Conditions bulletins preserve normalized snapshots and compare them with the previous bulletin. A first record is a baseline, not evidence of a change. Captures and published bulletins have permanent URLs.

Automation and editorial responsibility

The collection and bulletin pipeline uses deterministic parsing and comparisons. Automated bulletins are labeled as such. No AI-generated text is treated as manufacturer, resort, or government evidence. Human-authored reporting is identified separately and requires attributable supporting sources.

Corrections

Use the contact and corrections page to submit a specific URL, field, and suggested correction. Submissions enter a private review queue; they do not automatically alter source data or publish claims. Material editorial corrections should identify what changed and when.