How this works

What this site is for

Hawaiʻi Island generates a remarkable amount of official data, and almost none of it is written for the person actually asking a question. USGS publishes volcano updates in the register of a scientific bulletin. The weather service posts surf heights by zone code. The EPA logs air quality by monitor ID, and the Mauna Kea summit forecast reads like a pilot briefing. All of it accurate, all of it public domain, none of it answering what you actually typed into the search box: can I see lava on Thursday, is tonight worth the drive up the mountain, which side of the island has clean air today, where is the water calm enough to get in.

That gap is what this site fills. Each page takes one of those questions and puts the plain answer on top, with the instruments underneath and a link back to every source it came from. When the sources disagree or go quiet, we say so rather than smoothing it over.

The site is independent and free to read. It is not run by an agency and carries no official standing. Before you travel, and certainly before you make a safety decision, confirm with the official sources each page links to.

Where the answers come from

The volcano answer joins two official halves: eruption status from structured USGS data (the Hazard Notification System plus the observatory’s daily updates) and park access from the National Park Service alert feed. Kīlauea’s recent activity runs as numbered episodes with pauses between them, so “erupting” and “paused, next window forecast” are both normal answers.

The night sky verdict reads the Mauna Kea Weather Center’s summit forecast and the weather service’s cloud grid, and computes the moon and twilight on our end. Air quality comes from the EPA’s AirNow monitors in Hilo, Kona and Ocean View, rendered in the EPA’s own categories, colors and health wording. The ocean report combines the weather service’s surf zone forecast, the Hilo buoy, NOAA tides and the state health department’s beach advisories.

Four phenomena, one method: official feeds, numbers kept intact, a plain answer on top, sources cited underneath.

How current is this?

We poll the volcano feeds every ten minutes and the sky, air and ocean feeds every fifteen to thirty, rebuilding these pages on a short cycle, so what you see is minutes old rather than hours. Every status line is stamped with the date or time of the underlying reading, so you can tell the difference between “nothing has changed” and “we stopped hearing from the source”.

That distinction is the one design rule the whole site is built around. If a feed goes down we render the gap rather than the last thing we knew. Showing a park closure that has since been lifted, a calm-surf line during a warning, or an alert level that has since been raised is worse than showing nothing at all, so pages here degrade to “unavailable” and point you at the official source.