Data Sources
Last updated: July 2, 2026 · CrewCast public beta
CrewCast is built on public and freely accessible weather data. Here is exactly where every number comes from, how fresh it is, what its limits are, and the licensing status of each source.
🌩 National Weather Service (api.weather.gov)
Powers: severe-weather alerts (watches/warnings/advisories), alert push notifications, lightning-cell detection
Updates: continuous; we poll every 10 minutes
Limitations: US coverage only; occasional API slowness
Licensing: US government public-domain data; free including commercial use; courteous request rates and a User-Agent header required (we send one)
Fallback: alerts panel shows "unavailable"; health chip shows Partial
⛅ Open-Meteo
Powers: current conditions, hourly & 7-day forecast, job-site score, trade conditions, sun times
Updates: hourly model updates; we refresh every 10 minutes with retry + cached fallback
Limitations: model forecast (not station observations); rural bias possible
Licensing: free for non-commercial use; commercial use requires their paid API plan — required before CrewCast monetizes
Fallback: last-good cached data with a stale-data banner and "Cached" health state
📡 RainViewer (NEXRAD-derived radar)
Powers: animated precipitation radar tiles, 60-minute rain nowcast
Updates: ~10-minute radar frames; freshness shown in the radar legend
Limitations: tiles max out at zoom 7 (we upscale beyond); nowcast is extrapolation, not a model
Licensing: free tier is for non-commercial use; a commercial agreement is required before monetization
Fallback: radar layer hidden; nowcast card shows "unavailable"
🌀 National Hurricane Center
Powers: tropical storm positions, official track; cone & spaghetti visualizations are our own illustrative rendering
Updates: per NHC advisory cycle (typically 6-hourly); we poll every 15 minutes
Limitations: fetched via a public CORS proxy when direct access is blocked — a reliability weak point we plan to replace with our own proxy
Licensing: US government public-domain data
Fallback: tropics panel shows "unavailable"; health chip shows Partial
🏔 USGS Earthquakes
Powers: earthquake markers on the map (M2.5+, past week)
Updates: near-real-time feed
Licensing: US government public-domain data
Fallback: layer simply not shown
🔥 NASA EONET
Powers: active wildfire markers
Updates: daily-ish event curation; not a real-time fire perimeter product
Licensing: NASA open data
Fallback: layer simply not shown
🗺 CARTO basemap + OpenStreetMap / Nominatim
Powers: the dark map tiles; location search and reverse geocoding
Limitations: Nominatim is rate-limited (we debounce searches)
Licensing: CARTO basemaps are free for non-commercial use (commercial requires a plan); OSM data is ODbL — attribution shown on the map; Nominatim usage policy applies
Fallback: map still renders from cached tiles; search degrades gracefully
Commercial-use summary: the US-government sources (NWS, NHC, USGS, NASA) are public domain. Open-Meteo, RainViewer, and CARTO free tiers are non-commercial — CrewCast is currently a free beta, and paid plans for those three are required before charging users. Tracked in the project's DATA-LICENSING notes.