It's Friday evening. Rain is moving in from the west, smoke is drifting from the east, and strong winds are building to the south. You want to get outside this weekend, but where should you go?
Bluebird Forecast helps you find out. Search for destinations, provide a list of coordinates, or draw a polygon and discover the best peaks, trailheads, lakes, and other destinations for your next adventure. Bluebird Forecast analyzes the weather for your window, up to a year back or sixteen days ahead, and ranks destinations by precipitation, wind, temperature, freezing level, snow depth, cloud base, cloud cover, and air quality so you can quickly find the best objective.
Ready to find your Bluebird day? https://bluebirdforecast.com
- Destinations: Choose where to search by drawing an area on the map, searching by name, or providing custom coordinates.
- Forecast: Choose a weather model, then pick a day on the calendar, drag across days for a range, or analyze the current hour.
- Metrics: Choose how destinations should be ranked: driest conditions, lowest winds, ideal temperatures, freezing level, snow depth, cloud deck, or cleanest air. Set bounds to leave out the ones you would not consider.
- Layers: Enable additional map layers like wildfire perimeters, smoke, rain radar, snow depth, and the forecast grid.
- Analyze: Generate ranked results, explore them on the map, and compare forecast data across your selected destinations.
- Repeat: Adjust your search area, forecast window, ranking, or bounds at any time to find a better window.
See Usage for the full walkthrough.
The whole app ships as a single Docker container. Clone it and bring it up:
git clone https://github.com/zimmertr/bluebird
cd bluebird
docker compose up --build -dThen open http://localhost:8000.
| Doc | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Usage | Drawing polygons, forecast windows, and reading the results |
| Limits | The eight caps, why each exists, and what hitting one looks like |
| Data Sources | What each source can tell you, and what it cannot |
| API | The full HTTP API: no accounts, and an Open-Meteo key only for forecasts |
| Configuration | Environment variables and log levels |
| Architecture | How it is built and how it deploys |
| Development | Hot-reload setup and the test suites |
| Traffic | Rate limiting and the budgets protecting the upstream APIs |
| CI/CD | The pipeline from merge to production, with diagrams |
| Styles | The design system: roles, what enforces them, and the measured numbers |
| Contributing | How this project accepts work: one maintainer, an issue first for anything large |
Email hello@bluebirdforecast.com about anything: a summit at the wrong elevation, a destination that should be listed and isn't, a privacy question, or a page that will not load. No GitHub account needed.
If you can describe how to reproduce something, the issue board is the better channel. Security vulnerabilities go through GitHub's private advisory form rather than a public issue, as described in SECURITY.md.
Two public pages carry the rest: privacy for what Bluebird Forecast does with your data and which providers your requests reach, and terms for the license, the warranty disclaimer, and the licenses covering the data.
Copyright (c) 2026 TJ Zimmerman. Bluebird Forecast is source-available: the code is public, but it is not open source software.
Bluebird Forecast is licensed under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0. You may use, modify, self-host, and share it for any noncommercial purpose. Commercial use of any kind requires a separate license: contact hello@bluebirdforecast.com. It comes with no warranty; see LICENSE for the full terms.
The data providers and bundled software Bluebird Forecast is built on are credited in NOTICES.md.