Right now
Live readings from the farm's own station, updated every five minutes.
Conditions
--Chance of rain
--Loading…
Built from our station alone. It learned this microclimate — treat it as what the farm expects, not a forecast for your address. How it works
From orbit
GOES-18 is a weather satellite parked 22,000 miles above the Pacific, holding station over the same patch of sky so it can watch Hawaiʻi continuously. It rescans us about every ten minutes. Today we take those scans from NOAA and keep our own copy here, so nothing on this page calls out to anyone else's server. We are putting up a dish to receive GOES-18 directly — straight off the satellite, no internet in the middle — because the weather that knocks out the road and the phones is exactly the weather you want a picture of. Four ways of looking at the same sky, plus an animated loop.
From orbit
Sky
Down at Kawaihae
NOAA harbour stationRainfall
What has fallen here — lately, this year, and across the whole record.
Last two weeks
--Daily rainfall, inches. Faint marks are days the logger missed.
Records
since Aug 20242026 so far
Month by month
Running total, year against year
Inches accumulated since January 1 of each year, read from the gauge's own counter.
Wettest days on record
The rhythm here
Two patterns no forecast can tell you, because they only show up in a long record from one place.
When it rains
by hourWhich way the wind blows
since Aug 2024The archive
Every month since the station was sited outdoors at the end of July 2024.
Browse a month
Temperature range
Daily high and low for the chosen month. Readings before August 2024 are withheld — the station was not yet properly sited.
Tropical storms
Anything the hurricane centers are tracking, measured from the farm.
From the National Hurricane Center and the Central Pacific Hurricane Center. Distances are from the farm. Always follow Hawaiʻi County Civil Defense for official guidance.
About this station
The instrument on the hill, and the record it has kept.
The station
An Ecowitt WS-5000 on our farm at about 2,400 feet, recording every few seconds since August 2024, when it was sited outdoors. Everything here comes from that one instrument.
About the rain forecast
How the model was built, what it looks at, and how well it actually does. This part is about the forecast — not the station above.
How it was built
Our forecast is not bought in from anywhere. It is a model that lives on the farm — built here, trained here, and running here on the same small computer that keeps the rest of the place going.
We showed it two years of this microclimate's weather and it worked out for itself which patterns come before rain here. Nobody wrote the rules; it found them in our own record. It needs no internet: if the line goes down, as it does, the forecast keeps coming.
It works rather like twenty questions. To make one forecast it asks a short chain of yes-or-no questions about the weather right now — is the humidity above 94, is the pressure still falling, is the sun dimmer than it should be for this hour — and each chain ends in a guess. Fifty chains vote on every forecast, and it makes three at once: the next hour, the next two, the next four. The numbers below describe that machinery.
What it watches
The model weighs thirty different readings. These are the ones it leans on most — the percentage is how much of its total attention each one gets.
That last row is real. Lightning was offered to the model as an input, and it never used it once.
How accurate, honestly
It rarely misses. Over four months of live running, rain started 119 times and the model was already flagging for 112 of them.
It cries wolf. It also spends a lot of its time flagging — so a warning is a nudge to look outside, not a promise. Tuned loud on purpose: on a farm a missed shower costs more than a false one.
Worth being straight about what that catch rate does and does not mean. On this coast in the wet season, rain follows within two hours of any random moment about a third of the time. The model's real skill is the margin above that, not the headline.
Does this apply where you live?
Your elevation matters far more than your distance from us. We checked our rain against public gauges around the island, and it was not close.
farther away · our elevation
closer to us · 1,800 ft higher
How often each station saw rain in the same two-hour window we did. The farther station matches us better, because it sits at our height on the slope. Height beats distance, and it is not close.
If you are on this windward slope between about 1,300 and 3,400 feet — Kukuihaele across to Paauilo — our rain and yours tend to arrive together. Down near the coast, high toward Mauna Kea, or over the hill to Waimea, it is honestly not your weather.
We have drawn no boundary on a map on purpose. Rain here changes over remarkably short distances, and a confident line would imply precision we do not have.
Fine print
Days the logger missed appear as gaps, not as dry weather, because that is what they are. Readings from known sensor faults are withheld. Rain totals come from the gauge's own registers, corrected for the fact that they reset just after midnight. Satellite imagery is GOES-18's own scans, pulled from NOAA and re-served from here — and soon received directly from the satellite by our own dish.
Published as-is by a working farm, not a weather service. For warnings that matter, use the National Weather Service and Hawaiʻi County Civil Defense.