How does the weather gate actually work?

A destination "passes the gate" for a given day when both of these are true in the forecast we hold for that day:

• Daytime high ≥ 78 °F (25.5 °C)
• Probability of precipitation ≤ 25%

That's it — two numbers, no secret index, no marketing "sunshine score" that nobody can reproduce. On every card, the amber-shaded days are the days that clear the gate; the pale days don't. A trip is surfaced as a window when it contains a run of consecutive passing days that covers most of your stay.

We deliberately do not gate on cloud cover. Cloud-cover models disagree with each other far more than temperature and precipitation models do, and a bright hazy day is not a ruined trip. Rain is what ruins trips.

Forecasts are pulled from Open-Meteo's aggregated model ensemble and refreshed several times a day. The timestamp on the forecast strip on any page tells you exactly how fresh the numbers you are looking at are.