Sources and method
Where every number comes from.
Gulf of Cleveland News is an automated bulletin about Lake Erie at Cleveland. It is not a newspaper and has no reporters. It shows public U.S. government data and composes plain sentences from it.
The name
“Gulf of Cleveland” is a nickname for the city’s stretch of Lake Erie. The lake’s official name is Lake Erie, and this site uses that name for the water itself. Gulf of Cleveland News is not run by, or affiliated with, the City of Cleveland, NOAA, the National Weather Service or any government agency.
The instruments
Readings come from NOAA CO-OPS station 9063063 (Cleveland, OH) through NOAA’s public data API, every 10 minutes: water level (feet above Low Water Datum), water temperature, air temperature, and wind speed, gust and direction (knots). Low Water Datum is the zero that depths on Lake Erie navigation charts are measured from, so a level of +2.3 ft means the water is about 2.3 ft deeper than the chart shows. A value outside a believable range is dropped as an instrument glitch. A reading more than an hour old is marked stale and never counts toward a Shore Watch.
The warnings and the forecast
Every 10 minutes the site reads the National Weather Service’s active alerts for marine zone LEZ146 (Avon Point to Willowick OH) and, for Cuyahoga County (zone OHZ011), only beach hazards, rip current and lakeshore flood statements. It also reads the latest Nearshore Marine Forecast from NWS Cleveland and shows the part for LEZ146 word for word, with the time it was issued.
The Morning Dispatch
At 6:40 every morning, code turns the stored numbers into short sentences with fixed rules (for example, “1.2°F cooler than 24 hours earlier”). Each sentence links to its source. Nothing is written by AI, nothing is reported, and nothing is added that is not in a source.
Safety
This site is not for navigation or safety decisions. One station describes one spot; conditions elsewhere on the shore can differ, and the data can lag, fail or be revised by NOAA. Lightning, waves and cold water are dangerous: check the full forecast from NWS Cleveland, watch the sky, and use your own judgment.
Corrections
If a number here does not match its source, the source is right. The site keeps the readings as NOAA sent them (a value outside the range a sensor can physically report is stored blank instead), so the CSV downloads can be checked line by line against NOAA’s own data.