Cloud Stability Map
Live 1 / 3 / 6-hour re-score
Where Melbourne’s light will hold still: a stability score with live 1/3/6-hour windows and ranked shoot spots.
01 Problem
Weather apps answer cloudy or sunny. Filmmakers and photographers need a different question: where in Melbourne will the light stay steady as clouds drift across the sun? A citywide icon hides the streets that will flicker and the ones that will hold.
02 Approach
For each grid point: mean cloud cover, its standard deviation, and sun/shade transitions with hysteresis at 30% / 70%. Variability is 0.6·norm(stdev) + 0.4·norm(transitions); stability is 100 × (1 − variability). Shoot ranking adds brightness from cloud cover and shortwave radiation. The map is deck.gl on MapLibre, and the UI only calls its own /api/forecast contract — today it wraps Open-Meteo, tomorrow it can wrap an in-house model without touching the front end. The same handler runs as a Cloudflare Pages Function and as Vite middleware locally.
03 Result
A contour stability map over Greater Melbourne, a time-window slider that re-scores 1-, 3- and 6-hour windows live, and best / average / worst shoot cards. The product metric is the live windowing and ranked spots; there is no published accuracy against a holdout forecast.
04 What didn’t work
The first design painted raw cloud cover and answered the wrong question — intermittency is the signal, not mean sunniness. Night/astro mode is stubbed and an in-house forecasting model is still behind the provider seam.