Weather, Burn Days, Sunrise: RHBB’s New Homepage Feature Has You Covered

If you’ve ever driven from Eureka to Garberville, you know just how varied weather can be on the North Coast. Our coverage area spans hundreds of miles of coastline, mountains, and river valleys, and the weather across it can be wildly different from one town to the next.

Those that travel the region know it’s helpful to plan for the weather coming up. To help, we’ve built a weather dashboard into our site for those across our coverage area.

Starting later today, a new weather and burn day status bar will sit at the top of the Redheaded Blackbelt homepage at kymkemp.com. It pulls current and next-day forecasts for five locations across our coverage area: Eureka, Crescent City, Garberville, Weaverville, and Ukiah. Each location shows today’s high and low, tomorrow’s outlook, and sunrise and sunset times, which matters more than people realize when you’re planning a work day outdoors, a drive over a mountain pass, or whether the kids need a jacket.

The burn day component of this status bar has been high on the request list of our readers.

The bar includes burn day status for both air quality management districts that cover our region. The North Coast Unified Air Quality Management District, which covers Humboldt County, Del Norte County, and Trinity County, is broken into its three zones because conditions can vary enough to matter. Mendocino County’s Air Quality Management District has its own listing. Each shows one of three statuses: burn day, no burning, or info not available.

Here’s the part that makes it actually useful for planning: burn day decisions for the following day can be posted as early as 5 p.m. the evening before. If you’re thinking about burning brush or doing a debris pile on Saturday, check the bar Friday evening instead of waiting until you’ve already dragged everything out to the field. The bar also includes direct links to get your burn permits online and to read each district’s burning rules, so you don’t have to go hunting.

Redheaded Blackbelt staff update the burn day status manually, so if it shows “info not available” early in the day, check back often.

And if neither the weather nor burn day status matter to you, you have the ability to hide both features from the homepage on your device.

Features like this don’t build themselves. If the weather bar saves you one trip or one bad burn day decision, consider throwing a few dollars toward keeping this site going. You can donate online on our homepage at kymkemp.com. Every bit helps us keep doing what we do for this community.

Note: This article has updated to correct the coverage area of the NCUAQMD to include all of Trinity County.