About BereSuno

What this site is for

Most weather sites answer one question: what is the temperature right now. That is useful, and it is also the least interesting thing about weather. Knowing that Phoenix will hit 108 °F tomorrow tells you less than understanding why the Sonoran Desert behaves the way it does, when the monsoon changes the calculation, and what 108 °F at 12% humidity actually does to a human body compared with 95 °F at 80%.

So this site does three things. It shows you the official National Weather Service forecast for any US location you enter. It explains the climate of sixteen major cities in enough depth to be genuinely useful whether you live there or are visiting. And it gives you calculators that use the same published formulas forecasters use, with the reasoning spelled out instead of hidden.

Where the data comes from

Every forecast, current observation and weather alert on this site comes directly from the National Weather Service API at api.weather.gov, operated by NOAA. It is a public domain service, which means the data carries no licensing restrictions, and it is the authoritative source for US weather — the same feed that supplies the alerts sent to your phone.

We do not modify the forecast. Temperatures, conditions and alert text are passed through as issued, with two exceptions: current observations arrive from the API in metric units even for US stations, so we convert those to Fahrenheit, miles per hour and inches of mercury; and we group the service's day-and-night periods into calendar days, because that is how people read a forecast.

ZIP code and city coordinates come from the US Census Bureau Gazetteer files, also public domain. The National Weather Service API works from latitude and longitude rather than place names, so the Census data is what lets you type a ZIP code and get a forecast.

Climate normals quoted in the city guides — average highs, annual precipitation, snowfall — are drawn from NOAA's published 1991-2020 climate normals. They are rounded, and they describe long-term averages rather than any individual year.

How the calculators work

All five calculators run on the server using published formulas, and each page shows the formula it uses. The heat index is the Rothfusz regression the National Weather Service uses operationally, including both humidity adjustments. Wind chill is the 2001 NWS formula derived from human trials, not the discredited 1945 version. The hurricane calculator uses the Saffir-Simpson wind thresholds as currently defined, and the wind pressure figure comes from ASCE 7, the standard behind US building codes.

Two deliberate decisions are worth stating. The calculators do not run in your browser, because a formula in JavaScript can be altered and because server-side results let us explain them in text. And the hurricane calculator does not estimate storm surge from category, because the National Hurricane Center removed surge from the scale in 2010 after storms of identical category produced wildly different flooding. Giving you a surge number based on wind speed alone would be inventing precision that does not exist.

What this site is not

This is not an official source and not an emergency notification system. For life-threatening weather, the products that matter are Wireless Emergency Alerts on your phone and a NOAA Weather Radio, both of which reach you without a browser open and work when the power is out. Follow your local emergency officials over anything you read here.

The health guidance in the calculators describes typical healthy adults. Age, medication, pregnancy, cardiovascular conditions and acclimatization all shift the thresholds, sometimes a great deal. Nothing here is medical advice.

How the site is funded

BereSuno is funded by advertising. We show ads to cover hosting and the time spent writing and maintaining the content, and we keep them out of the way of the forecast and the article text. No advertiser has any say in what the site says, and there is no paid placement in the city guides or the calculators.

The site collects no accounts, requires no signup, and stores nothing about you beyond what the privacy policy describes. Searches are not logged against a profile. If you have a question or a correction, the contact form reaches a person.