About Belize Pulse
Belize Pulse is an independent, non-commercial project run from San Pedro by Joel Smith with an AI system built by Max. It is operated by Forward Mobility, Inc., which also runs the Belize Pulse WhatsApp service. Weather data is aggregated from the National Meteorological Service of Belize, ECMWF, NOAA (GOES lightning, National Hurricane Center), and Open-Meteo, plus Google DeepMind's WeatherNext 3, which counts as one of five forecasts in the rain chance. © 2024-6 Google LLC, whose machine learning models were used to create the experimental data made available under the following licence terms https://storage.googleapis.com/weathernext-public/terms-of-use.pdf. This data is intended for experimental modelling only and is not intended, validated, or approved for real world use. Nothing here is an official warning — for warnings follow the National Meteorological Service and NEMO.
Live, forecast, or a notice?
Three very different kinds of information sit on the front page and they all look alike on a screen, so every block carries a small ⓘ that says which it is. LIVE means an instrument read it — the Belize Pulse WeatherFlow Tempest station in the DFC area on the south end, the National Met Service station at the airstrip, the radar, a satellite. The big temperature and wind numbers prefer the Belize Pulse station when it is reporting (it posts every minute) and fall back to the airstrip station, then to a model — the line under the numbers and the ⓘ always name which one you are looking at. FORECAST means a computer model guessed it for later. OFFICIAL NOTICE means a public body published it and we are only mirroring it — the BEL outage list, the sargassum outlook. COMPUTED means arithmetic with no data source at all, like sunrise. Tap any ⓘ and it also tells you the time of the reading and how often it refreshes.
How the Nowcast works
The Nowcast is the rain block near the top of the front page — the verdict, the North / Secret Beach / Town / South strip, and the 90-minute rain clock. It is not a weather model. It is the National Met Service radar, read directly and moved forward.
Every ten minutes or so the radar at Philip Goldson publishes a new picture. We take the last few, turn the colours back into rain intensity, and measure how the rain moved from one picture to the next — which direction, how fast. Then we carry that motion forward: if a cell is 30 km east and running west at 30 km/h, it is about an hour away. That is the whole idea. It works well for the next ninety minutes and not at all beyond that, because real showers grow and die as they travel.
Ambergris Caye is about 40 km long and a squall is often only 3 to 5 km wide. A single answer for "the island" would be wrong most of the time — it can pour at the bridge while the south end stays dry — so the caye is read as four zones: North, Secret Beach (the lagoon side north of town), Town and South.
Aiming is the hard part. The further away a cell is, the less certain its track: the error works out to roughly 0.2 km for every kilometre of distance, plus 3 km. When a cell is wide compared with that error, we can say where it lands. When it is narrow, we cannot, and the page says "likely" and stays vague about the zone rather than promising rain on your roof. The confidence word on the sub-line, and the age of the radar frame next to it, tell you how much to lean on it. A stale frame or a single usable image drops the confidence.
Is it any good? That is being scored. Every alert is logged with what it promised, and it is checked against two things: replies from the ground ("no rain here") and the rain gauge at the airstrip. The Belize Pulse Tempest station at DFC adds a second gauge that reports every minute — enough to grade onset times to the minute rather than the quarter hour, and to tell drizzle from a real cell. Until that scoreboard has run for a season, treat the Nowcast as a good pair of eyes on the radar, not a promise.
Where the rest comes from
- Forecast — four global models (ECMWF IFS, ECMWF AIFS, NOAA GFS, DWD ICON) for 17.92°N 87.96°W via Open-Meteo, refreshed hourly. The "blend" is the median; the agreement label tells you when the models disagree so you can plan for a range.
- Lightning — NOAA GOES-19 Geostationary Lightning Mapper, refreshed hourly from the latest two minutes of satellite data. Flashes are counted inside a box around Belize and measured from San Pedro. Real-time lightning has a minute or two of latency and this page refreshes hourly — it tells you a storm is around, not that you are safe.
- Storms — NOAA National Hurricane Center active storms, judged by where each is forecast to go, not where it is now. A banner appears site-wide only when NHC's 5-day forecast track comes within 600 km of Ambergris Caye, Belize has a 10% or greater chance of tropical-storm winds, or a watch or warning is issued for Belize.
- Met Service — the National Meteorological Service of Belize general and marine forecasts, reproduced unmodified with acknowledgement, plus the Belize radar when its feed is live.
- Waves — Open-Meteo Marine at a point just outside the reef (17.92°N 87.90°W).
For machines
Everything on the front page is available as JSON at /api/now.json (CORS open, cached 5 minutes). Pages carry schema.org markup, and /llms.txt is a plain-text map of the site for AI tools. Robots are welcome.
Reusing our data
The open data files listed in /llms.txt are licensed CC BY 4.0: free to reuse, including commercially, with credit to belizepulse.com. Each file carries the date it was last checked; the original sources are named on each page.
Contact
Version 1 — September 2026. Times are Belize local (UTC−6, no daylight saving).
