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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.
Akutan sits at 54.1400°N, 165.7630°W in Aleutians East 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 Akutan, 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), 469 miles to the NE, beyond the roughly 150-mile range over which one is any use. By the time the lowest scan reaches Akutan its centre is around 131,100 ft up, well above the weather. In practice Akutan 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 PAUT · Akutan Arpt on the ASOS/AWOS network, 6.4 miles away. Near enough to be representative on most days, though a summer thunderstorm can soak one and miss the other entirely.
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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