Fishing Weather

Data Sources

Where the data behind a fishing read comes from.

Weather forecasts — Open-Meteo

Every fishing read starts from weather forecast data by Open-Meteo, used under the CC BY 4.0 license through their commercial API. Open-Meteo provides the weather data; Fishing Weather derives the fishing read — the GO, MAYBE, or SKIP call is our interpretation, not Open-Meteo’s, and the same attribution line appears wherever a derived read is shown.

Water context — USGS, USACE, and NOAA

Where Fishing Weather shows water context alongside the weather read, that context comes from public United States government data services, where coverage exists for your water. Each lane below says where it actually appears today:

  • USGS Water Services — water temperature readings, and context from the closest active USGS gauge. Gauge context is broad context from a nearby station, never an exact truth about your specific lake. Shown in the app.
  • USACE CWMS — reservoir water-level readings from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, for the reservoirs it covers. Shown in the app.
  • NOAA tide predictions — predicted high and low tides for coastal waters. Shown in the app and on supported coastal water pages on this site. These are predicted tide times and heights, not live water-level readings or tidal-current speeds. Where a coastal water has them, the tide can narrow the best window we display to the hours when the water is moving — it never changes the GO, MAYBE, or SKIP call, which always comes from weather.

Not every water has these lanes — coverage depends on where the official stations are. When a lane is unavailable, the app says so rather than filling the gap with a guess. If a data type is not listed on this page, Fishing Weather does not currently read it.

Freshness

Reads are computed on our servers from forecast data refreshed on a regular cadence, and every read shows when it was last updated. A read is a snapshot of the forecast at that time — it is not live radar and it is not a weather-warning service. How the pieces combine into a call is on the methodology page, with the plain-language version at how it works.