About The FM Gazette

The FM Gazette is a Fargo-Moorhead site built and run by one person - Brendan - started as a side project that just kept growing, one genuinely useful thing at a time.

The idea's pretty simple: build small, real tools for people who actually live here, backed by real data, and be upfront about what we do and don't know. Every tool shows its sources, so you can check our work instead of just trusting us.

Where the numbers come from

Public data from the agencies whose job it is to measure these things - not scraped from other weather sites:

• National Weather Service Grand Forks - the NWS office that covers Fargo-Moorhead: forecasts, watches and warnings, and the daily and monthly climate reports for Fargo's official station at Hector Airport.
• NOAA Regional Climate Centers (ACIS) - Fargo-Moorhead's daily weather record back to 1881, behind the frost dates, snowfall, below-zero, records, and holiday pages.
• NOAA National Water Prediction Service - the Red River gauge at Fargo and its crest forecasts.
• NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center - the aurora (Kp) forecast.
• NDSU Extension and NDAWN - lawn care timing and the soil and air temperatures it depends on.
• The cities of Fargo, West Fargo, and Moorhead - snow emergency rules and leaf pickup, each linked to the city's own page.
• The U.S. Naval Observatory - the yardstick our sunrise, sunset, and moon calculations are checked against.

How we check our work

Before a tool goes up, its numbers get checked against the official source - and those checks are written as automated tests, so they keep getting re-checked every time the site changes. A few examples:

• The record high and low for each day match the National Weather Service's own daily climate report on every date we've compared.
• Last winter's 39 below-zero days add up exactly from the Weather Service's monthly reports.
• Sunrise and sunset land within a minute of the U.S. Naval Observatory.

When we make a judgment call instead of quoting a source - like what counts as a "long shot" for the northern lights - the page says so.

How The FM Gazette makes money

Right now, it doesn't. There are no ads, no paid placements, and no paid listings - the business directory is free, and nobody pays to be on it. We use Google Analytics to count visits, so we know which tools people actually use.

If that ever changes - a sponsor, a featured listing - it'll be clearly labeled where it appears, it will never change what a tool tells you, and it'll be explained on this page first.

What stays free

Every dashboard and tool here is free to use, and that's not changing. If The FM Gazette ever adds paid features down the road, they'll be things layered on top - never a paywall on the tools you already rely on. And if that's ever at risk of changing, we'll say so here, plainly, before it happens.

Something wrong?

Rules change and data has hiccups. If something here doesn't match what you're seeing, we'd rather hear it from you than get it wrong: [email protected].