Where every number comes from

Everything in Sunset Beach comes from public data about this one beach, fetched by the Worker at sunsetbeach.neuralconfig.com and never by your phone. The Worker reads 28 upstream feeds — the rows /api/health reports — plus a handful of things it computes with no upstream at all (sun and moon, the almanac, parking, beach rules, the camera and ship-tracker links). Nothing is scraped or fetched on your behalf; the same cached copy serves everyone. This page is the full list, one row per upstream, with what it feeds and what it cannot tell you.

Caution

Sunset Beach is not a safety service and the beach has no lifeguards. Rip current risk, surf height and swim advisories come from the National Weather Service and NC DEQ and are forecasts and periodic samples — not observations of the water in front of you. Never let this app, or any app, substitute for looking at the sea, posted flags and signs, and official warnings.

The 28 upstreams

Refresh is how long the Worker keeps a copy before asking the upstream again. Fallback is how long a last-known-good copy may be shown, labelled as such, if the upstream is down (see How fresh the data is). Where no fallback is listed it is the default of 1 day.

#	Upstream	What it is	Feeds	Refresh	Known limits
1	NDBC 41024 “Sunset Nearshore (SUN2)“	NOAA buoy at 33.837N 78.477W, essentially off the beach	Today: wind, pressure, air and water temperature	5 min	Reports no wave data at all — WVHT/DPD/APD/MWD are always missing and it has no spectral file. Meteorology and sea-surface temperature only.
2	NDBC 41013 “Frying Pan Shoals” (spectral)	NOAA buoy ~50 mi offshore SE	Water: Offshore — swell height, period and direction, wind-wave, steepness	5 min	The only live wave observation available. It is 50 miles out, not the surf at the beach.
3	NDBC 41110 “Masonboro Inlet”	NOAA nearshore waverider ~60 mi NE	Sources screen cross-check row (water temperature)	5 min	Sanity check only; the app prints its water temperature and declares no agreement.
4	NWS Surf Zone Forecast NCZ110	Human-written NWS Wilmington text product; the app reads the “Ocean Isle Beach West” sub-zone row	Today: rip current risk, surf height, water temperature; Water: Surf zone forecast; When to go / Best days	index 15 min, product 30 min	The best beach-specific source. Days 0–1 are the West sub-zone; the extended days are written once for the whole Coastal Brunswick zone (Ocean Isle to the state line) and are flagged wholeZone.
5	NWS gridpoint ILM 70,57	Raw NWS forecast grid for 33.8807,-78.5111	Today: Weather ahead, thunder chance, fog risk, wind; the cloud gate in the launch model; planner	10 min	Coarser past about day 3 (coarse). lightningActivityLevel and probabilityOfTropicalStormWinds are present upstream and deliberately not read.
6	NWS active alerts	api.weather.gov/alerts/active?point=… for the beach	Today headline (“Active alert: …”), safety push	2 min	Public domain. Only alerts covering this point.
7	CO-OPS 8659897 “Sunset Beach Pier”	NOAA harmonic tide predictions: highs and lows 15 days ahead, 6-minute curve 4 days	Water: Tide chart, Highs & lows; almanac; tide alerts	6 h	Predictions only — the station lost its water-level sensor in 2008. 8659898 “Sunset Beach Bridge” has no predictions and is not used.
8	Open-Meteo Marine	Wave model (GFS-Wave / ICON-Wave / WAM) on a ~25 km grid	Water: forecast waves, sea temperature ahead; planner	15 min	The model cell is offshore of the beach; the response carries offsetKm. Non-commercial tier.
9	Launch Library 2 (The Space Devs)	launch/upcoming list, 40 launches, mode=detailed	Events: rocket launches, Next visible launch; Live Activity; launch alerts	4 h, dropping to 5 min while a visible launch is within T−75 to T+20 min; fallback 7 d	Only Cape Canaveral / KSC and Wallops Island pads are modelled. Anonymous limit ~15 requests/hour per IP; on any failed fetch (typically a 429) the Worker falls back to The Space Devs’ lldev mirror, whose data can lag, and says so in the source name.
10	Open-Meteo forecast	Radiation, UV, layered cloud (low/mid/high), visibility, temperature, precipitation, wind — 7 days plus the past day	Today: Sunrise & sunset, Air & sun (UV, burn time), when rain starts; planner	15 min	Drives the sunset and sunrise model. Non-commercial tier.
11	Open-Meteo Air Quality (CAMS)	US AQI, PM2.5, PM10, ozone, NO2, SO2, CO, dust	Today: Air & sun; activity scores	30 min	Modelled, not a monitor on the beach.
12	Town calendar + concerts	Three parts: the Town of Sunset Beach Office 365 ICS feed (3 h, fallback 14 d); the town’s Sunset Sound Waves schedule page (24 h, 30 d); the Sunset Beach Fishing Pier events page, scraped (12 h, 30 d)	Events tab; timeline	see left	45 days ahead. The Wednesday concert series is reconstructed from the town’s stated weekly pattern, marked inferred, and its season end is assumed to be Labor Day. The pier page is HTML and will break if redesigned; unparsed lines are shown raw.
13	USGS NWIS gauges	Three gauges: 02110777 Intracoastal Waterway at Nixons Crossroads (~12 mi), 02110550 Waccamaw River above Conway (~30 mi), 02105769 Cape Fear River at Lock 1 (~90 mi)	Water: Inland water	30 min	The ICW gauge is the only local one. Cape Fear discharge is an upstream pressure indicator, not a measurement of anything at the beach.
14	OBIS	Ocean Biodiversity Information System occurrence records for six species in a ~35-mile box	Nature: Times & seasons, What you might see	7 d; fallback 60 d	Historical records with a lag of months to years — never live sightings. Record dates measure survey effort, so seasons are curated, not derived from them.
15	Sunset Beach Turtle Watch Program	sunsetbeachturtles.org home page, scraped for the season’s nest / false crawl / boil totals, plus a computed NC season model	Nature: Sea turtles; almanac hatch window	6 h; fallback 14 d	Season totals only — no per-nest hatch dates exist publicly. If the scrape finds no numbers, the season model still shows and says the totals weren’t found.
16	iNaturalist	Community observations within 40 km: last 30 days, species counts over 14 days, and 8 years of whales/dolphins, sea turtles, sharks/rays	Nature: Seen near here lately, Nature map	6 h / 24 h / 7 d; fallback 7 / 14 / 30 d	Measures observers, not animals. Protected species (all sea turtles) have deliberately blurred locations and are not drawn as points. Rate-limited; the Worker coordinates fetches globally.
17	NOAA NEFSC right whale layers	Dynamic Management Areas (3 h, fallback 3 d), Seasonal Management Areas (12 h, 7 d), critical habitat Unit 2 (30 d, 180 d)	Nature: Right whales; almanac whale window	see left	Slow zones and habitat, not whale positions — no public feed of individual whale positions exists. An empty zone layer is a real answer, not a failure.
18	eBird (Cornell Lab)	Recent observations within 30 km over 7 days, and notable (rarity) records over 14 days	Nature: Birds, Notable	1 h; fallback 7 d	The only source that needs an API key (EBIRD_API_KEY). Without one the panel reads “Not configured”, not broken. Measures birding effort as much as birds.
19	BirdCast (Cornell Lab)	Radar migration for Brunswick County (US-NC-019), read from BirdCast’s public S3 bucket; the night from 7 PM to 8 AM sampled every two hours	Nature: Migration radar	listing 10 min (fallback 3 d); each object 7 d	Observed only — the forecast bucket is not public, so the app links out for it. County-wide volume, never species; daytime readings are invalid by design.
20	NC DEQ Recreational Water Quality	ArcGIS FeatureServer: advisory status, enterococcus results and posting history for ocean stations S1, S2, S3 on this beach, plus the swim-season table	Today: Water quality; safety push	6 h; fallback 30 d (swim season 30 d / 365 d)	Sampling is weekly, so a clear result can be most of a week old. Sound-side stations are deliberately excluded.
21	NCDEQ shellfish	Conditional management unit closures within 6 nautical miles (3 h, fallback 7 d) and the standing growing-area classification (7 d, 90 d)	Beach info: Shellfish	see left	Read from Status; HA_STATUS disagrees on every closed unit statewide and is not used. No closure start or end date exists — only when the state last edited the layer.
22	Turtle Watch scrape vs. the standardised nest database	seaturtle.org nest database, beach 23 “Sunset Beach plus Bird Island”	/api/health only — a canary	6 h; fallback 7 d	Publishes only whether the two nest counts agree (within two). No figure from seaturtle.org appears anywhere: its terms withhold permission to reference the data without written consent.
23	NCDEQ sanitary sewer overflows	Reported spills within 10 nautical miles in the last 14 days	Today: a conditional line inside Water quality	1 h; fallback 2 d	Renders nothing at all when empty, which is the normal state (about one a month county-wide, mostly inland).
24	NHC Atlantic Tropical Weather Outlook	nhc.noaa.gov/index-at.xml, issued four times a day	Beach info: The tropics	1 h; fallback 2 d	Basin-wide formation chances, not a local forecast. CurrentStorms.json is deliberately not parsed.
25	CO-OPS 8661070 “Springmaid Pier”	Observed vs. predicted water level at the nearest instrumented station, about 24 nautical miles down the coast	Water: Against the prediction	10 min; fallback 3 h	Only the anomaly (observed minus predicted) is carried across; the absolute level and that station’s flood thresholds are never shown.
26	NWS Coastal Waters Forecast AMZ252	Human-written nearshore forecast, Cape Fear to Little River Inlet out 20 nm	Water: Offshore	list 15 min; product 1 h, fallback 24 h	A forecast, not a wave observation. AMZ250 also says NC and is the wrong side of Cape Fear.
27	Sunset Beach Fishing Pier daily report	The pier’s blog RSS at apps.sunsetbeachpier.com	Fishing: What’s biting; pier water temperature	1 h; fallback 30 d	The catch is yesterday’s, from one pier. Read over plain HTTP because the host’s certificate is for another name. The pier shuts for the winter, so a months-old report is the season, not a fault.
28	N.C. DMF proclamations in effect (finfish)	Three pages of the state’s proclamation list	Fishing: Before you keep one	6 h; fallback 30 d	The limits themselves are read by hand and stamped with a date; this feed only says whether a newer proclamation names a fish. Not legal advice.

What is computed, not fetched

These have no upstream, so they can be neither stale nor unavailable. The Sources screen lists four of them (Almanac, Parking, Beach rules & access, Ships offshore) as “Computed locally by the Worker — no upstream”; the rest simply have no row:

Panel	Computed from
Sun and moon (sunrise, sunset, twilight, golden hour, moonrise over the ocean)	Astronomy for 33.8807, −78.5111
Almanac (“When to go”) and the week planner	Tide, sun, moon, plus the forecast sources above
Timeline (Upcoming)	Events, launches and sky, already fetched
Parking	The town’s paid-parking ordinance as a function of the date and time
Beach rules & access	Read off the town’s Beach Rules and Beach Access Points pages, dated 2026-08-09
Beach cams and Ships offshore	Curated links opened in Safari — nothing is fetched or tracked

Where to see this live

• In the app: Beach info › Sources lists each panel with a status dot, under the section “Every upstream”; tap a row for the source name, the upstream URL and any fallback reason. The section “What this doesn’t know” lists the standing gaps.
• On the web: https://sunsetbeach.neuralconfig.com/api/health returns all 28 rows with ok, stale, fetchedAt, and where the feed carries one, the upstream’s own observedAt.

Next steps

How fresh the data is Cache lifetimes, the 5-minute warmer, and what 'last known good' means on a card.

Limits and what it doesn't know One beach, no lifeguards, no wave sensor, and the sources that are scraped by courtesy.

Public JSON API Every /api route, the response envelope, and how caching headers behave.

How the app judges things Activity scores, the sunset model, rip verdicts and launch visibility.