Who is behind the duck
About WeatherDuck. Built by an inversion chaser.
WeatherDuck is an independent UK weather service for people who plan around mountains, valleys and dawn skies. It is designed, built and run by one person, with a lot of very early alarms.
The short version
Hello, I’m Joss
I build WeatherDuck. It started because no forecast could answer the only question that matters on an inversion morning: if I set the alarm for 4am and climb, will I come out above the cloud?
Generic apps could tell me it would be sunny or foggy. None of them could tell me whether the fog would sit in the valley with clear air above it, how high the cloud top might reach, or which valleys were most likely to fill overnight. So I taught myself to read atmospheric profiles, then taught a website to read them for me.
Years later, WeatherDuck watches hundreds of UK valleys and summits through every night of the season. I still climb into the dark on the mornings it says Likely, partly for the view and partly because checking our own forecasts against the real sky is the whole point.
WeatherDuck is operated by Weather Duck Ltd, a company registered in the United Kingdom.
Trust is earned, not claimed
Forecasts you can check up on
Weather forecasting is easy to talk up after the event. WeatherDuck records its headline inversion forecasts before dawn happens, then reviews them in public: the hits, the near misses and the mornings we got wrong.
- Forecast verification hub: saved forecasts checked against what actually happened, including photographed events forecast a day or more ahead
- How the forecast works: the data, the scoring and the honest limits, all written down
- Independent reviews on Trustpilot
Standing on good data
What powers the forecasts
WeatherDuck does its own scoring and analysis on top of trusted public data sources.
- High resolution UK Met Office model data, including full atmospheric profiles, via Open-Meteo
- Live rain gauge observations from the Environment Agency, SEPA and Natural Resources Wales
- Space weather from NOAA for the stargazing and aurora outlooks
Full source and licence details live on the safety information and data sources page, along with guidance on using mountain forecasts responsibly.
See it in action
Try the forecasts
The best introduction is a search. Check the cloud inversion forecast and predictor for the next 24 hours, look up ground conditions for your next walk, or search any UK location on the full forecast. No account needed.