Fog is famously unpredictable. Foggy, we hope, is less so.
This is where we've gathered what we think is most helpful to know. How the app works, where our data comes from, and how we think about your privacy. If you have a question that isn't here, just email us at support@foggysf.app and someone on the team will get back to you.
A Few Things to Know.
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Fog is fundamental to life in the San Francisco Bay Area but there has never been a straightforward way to know in real-time where it’s foggy and where it isn’t. Fog is difficult to forecast, it moves fast, and the variables that form fog manifest differently across microclimates.
As a result, traditional weather apps and the meteorological data they highlight don’t help people in the Bay Area understand one of our most frequent and formidable weather phenomena.
We’re taking a new approach with Foggy, combining satellite imagery and ground-level community reporting from helpful neighbors to give you the fullest picture of fog conditions in your local microclimate, in real-time.
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Foggy is available in the iOS and Android app stores, and is specifically designed around the unique relationship the San Francisco Bay Area and its people have with fog. You don’t have to be physically present in the Bay Area to use Foggy, but you only get the full experience while you’re here.
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Fog forecasting is highly complex and, for now, best left to our local meteorologists. Throughout Foggy’s development and beta testing, forecasts and fog predictions have been a common request from our community. We’ll continue to listen to your feedback and develop additional useful tools as we go.
About Foggy
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Foggy is creating a shared view of fog across the Bay Area by combining satellite imagery with community reports from neighbors on the ground. This combination provides the fullest picture of real-time fog conditions across our regional microclimates.
Foggy’s map shows you satellite imagery of the fog and clouds and how they’re moving with two-hour and 24-hour playback loops controlled in the app. New satellite images are refreshed every five minutes.
Swipe up for an expanded view of local fog reports from within the last two hours, complete with conditions, timestamps and neighborhood labels. Foggy also lets you keep a personal logbook of the community reports you’ve submitted, which you can refer back to (or delete) any time.
Foggy never shows your personal location, or the exact location of your reports to anyone else.
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Foggy pulls data from trusted sources into our own proprietary models to understand atmospheric conditions and produce the images you see in the app.
Our satellite images are composites we create with data from the NOAA GOES Satellite, which sends refreshed information every five minutes. We also use sounding data (air temperature and humidity) from the NOAA Storm Prediction Center to help us infer whether it’s foggy, cloudy or clear–even in low light or nighttime.
We then combine these multiple layers of data with custom coloring and make adjustments for time of day, solar angle, and historical analysis. Our base map provider is Mapbox, and we add neighborhood labels from publicly available data sets including the California Open Data Portal and San Francisco’s Department of City Planning.
The final and most important data source is community reporting from helpful neighbors who share real-time conditions across the Bay Area.
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Our data sources only tell part of the fog’s story, and accurate map readings can be particularly challenging at dawn, dusk and dark because satellite imagery is less clear in low light.
With the added dimension of community reporting you see a fuller picture of conditions where you are, and across local microclimates. If you don’t see accurate recent reports in your area, adding one of your own spreads fog-awareness to others in the community.
How Foggy Works
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Privacy is a core pillar of our design. We do not sell user data and we do not disclose any information about you to third-party marketing partners or advertising networks.
Foggy doesn’t require you to create an account or share your email address to use the app. We’ve designed an ad-free, anonymous-first experience, covered by a one-time $5.99 price to download.
This makes it possible to ensure your relationship with the fog is fully your own. And you can feel good about supporting a small team of real people building a tool for our community, too.
You can use Foggy without sharing any information about you with us, though some functionality will then be limited. The types of information you can choose to share with us and how it’s used are detailed in our Privacy Policy.
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Enabling location services is totally optional. We believe it makes your experience more fun by seeing where you are on the map in relation to fog, clouds and the city’s geography, and by showing you the community fog report for your local area.
When you enable location services, we only see an approximate location to identify your neighborhood; your exact location is never saved or shown to others. This way, you can see fog reports from other users in your area, while protecting their (and your) privacy.
You can stop sharing location at any time within your device settings and still use Foggy, though some functionality will then be limited. Learn more about how your location information enables certain map-related features in our Privacy Policy.
Privacy
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Community reports are on-the ground-updates from people experiencing weather across the Bay Area’s microclimates. Fog reports are visible on the map for two hours after they’re made, providing a new level of fog-awareness that people in the Bay Area can actually use to plan their days.
While looking at the map, simply swipe up on the shaded box on the lower part of your screen. This expanded view shows you the most recent community reports in your area, your local fog and cloud readings, and will prompt you to refresh the map every five minutes when new satellite data is available.
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Share your feedback in the app by going to Menu > Feedback. For help with using the app, send us a message via email at support@foggysf.app and a real person will respond. No bots here
In the meantime, check out our blog, follow us on Instagram and sign up for our email newsletter to stay in the loop on the latest updates and community events.