Lake Champlain & Mountains Recreational Dashboard

Wind barb & card border colors

Lake stations: green under 15 mph, yellow 15–25 mph, red above 25 mph. Mountain stations (Mt. Mansfield, Whiteface) use raised thresholds since exposed summits run windier in normal conditions: green under 30 mph, yellow 30–45 mph, red above 45 mph. Based on sustained wind speed (or gust, if sustained isn't available).

Wind & temperature gauges — Colchester Reef, Diamond Island & Burton Island

NOAA/NWS station observations (api.weather.gov) for gust and temperature, combined with sustained wind from the Iowa Environmental Mesonet's VTWAC network (mesonet.agron.iastate.edu) — these are all University of Vermont monitoring stations that report through both networks. Water temperature from USGS gauges.

NWS + IEM + USGS

Mt. Mansfield

Sustained wind, gust, and direction from NWS's hourly "RRS" text product (SHEF-encoded, issued by NWS Burlington). Temperature from the IEM RR2BTV product, using the latest MMNV1 TAIRGZZ observation.

NWS RRS + IEM RR2BTV

Whiteface

Atmospheric Sciences Research Center (University at Albany) Whiteface Mountain Field Station API — a summit weather station independent of the NWS network.

ASRC / SUNY Albany

Valcour Buoy

Primary: SUNY Plattsburgh Lake Champlain Research Institute's Valcour buoy 7-day CSV feed (LCRI buoy data). NOAA National Data Buoy Center station 45178 (ndbc.noaa.gov) is retained as the automatic fallback if the LCRI feed is unavailable.

SUNY Plattsburgh LCRI + NOAA NDBC fallback — LCRI wind in m/s → kt → mph, temperatures in °C, waves in m

Active hazards banner

NWS active alerts for each station's location (api.weather.gov/alerts), filtered to wind/winter advisories relevant to lake and mountain recreation.

NWS Alerts API

Center map — wave height + wind barbs

NOAA/NCEP's operational GLWU (Great Lakes Wave) WaveWatch III model, specifically its Lake Champlain 500m grid (grlr_500m_lc), pulled directly from NOMADS. Rendered by a custom Python/Cartopy script we built — not GLERL's separate experimental Lake Champlain nowcast system, which uses a different (NWM+FVCOM+WaveWatch III) model and has no public data feed.

NOAA/NCEP NOMADS (operational GLWU)

8-station wave height forecast (right panel)

Built from the exact same NOMADS GLWU data as the map above — wave height extracted at 8 named points (2 are exact NDBC/CDIP buoy coordinates; the rest are nearest-water-grid-point approximations of well-known lake locations) across the model's forecast hours. Forward-looking only, no historical observed data.

NOAA/NCEP NOMADS (operational GLWU)

Recreational text forecast

NWS Burlington, VT (BTV) office's "REC" text product (api.weather.gov/products).

NWS Burlington (BTV)

LAKE CHAMPLAIN & MOUNTAINS RECREATIONAL DASHBOARD

Where this data comes from