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Forecasts come from the National Weather Service's own computer models, and current conditions from the nearest reporting weather station. Both are served through the weather API. A forecast is guidance, not a warning, and anything the Weather Service has actually issued is on the live map.
Kodiak sits at 57.7912°N, 152.4197°W in Kodiak Island Borough, Alaska. The forecast above is drawn for that point from the National Weather Service's own computer models: a seven-day outlook, and a finer-grained one covering the next eighteen hours where it reaches, and the radar and alert panels show what the Weather Service has out over the area right now.
Place data from the US Census Bureau. Coordinates are the Census internal point for Kodiak, and the forecast is for that location, not for every address inside the city limits, and a large city can have real weather differences from one side to the other.
The nearest WSR-88D is PAKC (King Salmon, AK), 165 miles to the WNW, beyond the roughly 150-mile range over which one is any use. By the time the lowest scan reaches Kodiak its centre is around 21,200 ft up, well above the weather. In practice Kodiak has no radar coverage: what reaches you is satellite, surface reports and the forecaster's judgement, and a warning here is built from those rather than from a velocity couplet someone watched spin up.
The closest instrument actually measuring the air is PADQ · Kodiak Arpt on the ASOS/AWOS network, 3.8 miles away. Close enough that its readings are, for practical purposes, the conditions in town.
Beam height is the standard 4/3-earth approximation for the 0.5° scan and assumes normal refraction; it is where the centre of the beam is, not its edges, and unusual temperature profiles bend it. Radar siting from the NWS WSR-88D network, station positions from the Alaska observing network as of this build.
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