Hourly + 7-day + active storm watch. Rain probabilities are locally calibrated — a model fitted to 2.5 wet seasons of real rain-gauge data from a Saladita-area station and validated on months it never saw. Global forecasts systematically over-call rain on this coast; ours is tuned to what actually falls here.
Each row is one day with its rain window summary. Click to expand for the full storm breakdown — start/end times, total mm, peak hourly rate, max gust, confidence, sideways-rain risk, and the hour-by-hour ramp.
Rain risk here is mostly at night: the 06–12h block carries about 8% of wet-season rain. Night lows barely move (the station's night-to-night spread is 1.7 °F), so the served low is the model minus 1.3 °F. The sea breeze turns onshore about 10:25; plan on roughly three clean hours after first light. Station audit 2026-09-27.
Active East Pacific (EP) and Central Pacific (CP) tropical cyclones are pulled from the National Hurricane Center's CurrentStorms.json advisory feed every 15 minutes. For each storm within 1,500 km of Saladita, we compute current distance and bearing, then project closest pass over the next 5 days assuming constant heading + speed (linear extrapolation, valid ±24h, increasingly rough beyond 48h — NHC's official cone is always tighter). Severity ladder: critical ≤200 km projected, warning ≤500 km, advisory ≤800 km current distance, watch within 1,500 km.
A storm gets a name once it becomes a tropical storm: sustained winds of 34 kt (39 mph, 63 km/h) or more, averaged over one minute. Weaker systems are tropical depressions. For the eastern Pacific, the ocean east of 140°W that includes this coast, the National Hurricane Center uses six lists of names approved by the World Meteorological Organization, one per year, recycled every six years: the 2026 list comes back in 2032. Each list runs A to Z, mixes English and Spanish names, and alternates men's and women's names (Adrian, Beatriz, Calvin, Debora…).
Each season starts at the top of its own list, so the first named storm of every year starts with A. A storm that forms out of season takes the list of the nearest season by date: one on December 28 takes the previous season's list, one in February the next season's. The central Pacific near Hawaii works differently: four lists of Hawaiian names are used one after another, and each season picks up where the last one stopped. If more than 24 storms are named in one eastern Pacific season, the extra ones take names from an alternate WMO list. The Greek alphabet, once used for overflow, was dropped in 2021.
Names say nothing about strength. Until 1978 every eastern Pacific storm had a woman's name, which is why so many famous older storms are female; men's names were added that year (1979 in the Atlantic). When a storm is deadly or destructive enough, the WMO retires its name and picks a replacement with the same letter. Retired names from storms that hit Mexico's Pacific coast include Pauline (1997), Kenna (2002), Manuel (2013), Odile (2014), Patricia (2015), Otis (2023) and John (2024). Otis is now Otilio on the list, and Patricia is now Pamela.
Sources: NHC tropical cyclone names, NHC naming history and retired names, NHC glossary, WMO on ending the Greek alphabet. Checked 11 October 2026.
Open-Meteo's precipitation_probability comes from a multi-model ensemble (ECMWF, GFS, ICON). It's reliable globally but tuned for the median Earth. We verified it against three years of five-minute rain-gauge observations from a local station and found the opposite of the folk wisdom: on this stretch of coast it over-calls rain. On wet-season storm days the model's rain usually starts about 3 hours before the gauge's first rain (median; earlier than 6 hours on about a quarter of days), while the middle of the storm is on time. Real Saladita rain is nocturnal: two-thirds of wet-season rain falls between 6 pm and 6 am, onsets cluster between 3 pm and midnight, and late mornings are nearly dry. Our calibrated probability is a statistical model fitted to that record (inputs: humidity, CAPE, cloud cover, time of day, season, the model's own probability and pressure change) and validated on months it never trained on. Two things the station record settled: the barometer here swings 2 to 2.5 mb twice a day (the air tide), so a "falling pressure" alarm fires on most afternoons and predicts nothing — the site now shows the pressure anomaly against that tide — and the real afternoon cue is beach humidity: 85% or more at 1 pm meant rain by dark eleven times out of twelve.
We scored ICON, ECMWF, GFS and the blend against the beach station's daily peak gust on the months when its anemometer was healthy (it was dead, stuck or rotated for stretches of 2024–2026, which an earlier version of this page did not know). No model tracks day-to-day gusts here: the best correlation is 0.18, and ICON's sea breeze runs about twice too strong. The station's own monthly climatology (error 1.6 kt) and yesterday's reading (1.8 kt) beat every model, so the daily gust shown is a blend of those two. Model gusts are kept as a storm flag: when they run far above the station's normal range, or a named storm is within 500 km, the model number is shown and used. Daily highs work the same way: yesterday's station high beats every model at every lead, so the high is 60% yesterday's reading and 40% the model with a seasonal offset (the models run 2 °F cold in the wet season and 2 °F warm in spring). Lows are ECMWF blended half with yesterday's station low.
Tide times and heights are computed from a harmonic model of 33 constituents fitted by least squares to the University of Hawaii Sea Level Center's research-quality hourly record for the Zihuatanejo tide gauge (2011–2013, 13,206 valid hours, fit residual 6.4 cm on a tide with 18.6 cm standard deviation). Heights are metres above mean lower-low water. Heights are within about 20%, because a two-year record cannot resolve the 18.6-year nodal cycle. Extreme times agree within about 15 minutes with a published table for Zihuatanejo checked on 28 September 2026. A second public table disagreed by up to 1.7 hours and lists several spurious extremes a day, so it is not used as a check. Tides here are small, roughly 0.35 m on neaps and 0.6 m on springs, mixed with a semidiurnal lean. Until 24 September 2026 the site's tide range came from a NOAA station that turned out to be Brookings, Oregon (NOAA has no Mexican stations), and the tide phase was a fixed 12.4-hour clock; both are replaced.
Generic 1-10 condition ratings collapse too much information. We show the raw data — temp, conditions, rain probability, wind, period — and let you read it. The two place exceptions: the storm-watch severity ladder (because it drives action), and the rain-elevated / calibrated-divergence cell coloring on the hourly strip (because it draws your eye to the hours that matter).
Weather + air quality: Open-Meteo (CC-BY).
Tropical cyclones: NOAA National Hurricane Center.
Locally-calibrated rain trigger: in-house, empirical thresholds for the Pacific Mexico coast wet season; subject to refinement as ground-truth observations accumulate.