The Wired Pier is an array of sensitive instruments around the Exploratorium campus at Piers 15 and 17, measuring and recording conditions in the environment—the weather, Bay water, pollution, and more. We're displaying the live data on this website and in the Fisher Bay Observatory Gallery. We're also archiving the data so that the public and our scientific partners can explore patterns and trends in the atmosphere, oceans, and urban landscape.
The Data Explorer lets you examine our environmental data archive. Compare different types of measurements—such as rainfall, water temperature, or carbon dioxide—and see what you can discover.
You’ve seen high and low tides at the beach. Get to know the daily and monthly cycles of the tides, why they change every day, and how they affect San Francisco Bay.
See how the salinity, or saltiness, of Bay water rises and falls with the tides, and what many years of salinity data reveals about California’s climate.
Learn more about the natural processes behind the numbers. These do-it-yourself activities let you try things like building a device to measure the saltiness of water, or learning about the link between gravity and tides.
Can you predict when Bay water will be at its warmest? Or coldest? You can if you take a look at some graphs from our Data Explorer.
See how our data collection supports scientific data networks and research, and helps educate students and the public.
Check out a bird’s-eye view of our piers and see where our field station sensors are and what kinds of data they’re gathering.
The Exploratorium periodically hosts ocean research and exploration vessels at Pier 17.
by Mary Miller • October 18, 2017
Fall, not summer, is fire season in California. The aftermath of rainless but foggy summers and a shift in the winds that normally bring cool, moist air from the Pacific but instead blow from the dry, warm interior create the perfect recipe for fires. That weather pattern exploded this October into deadly wildfires that affected air quality all over the Bay Area.
by Mary Miller • April 19, 2017
The Data Explorer web app lets you access and explore environmental data gathered at the Exploratorium’s waterfront location. The app lets you quickly and easily compare different datasets using familiar interactions like pan, pinch, click, and zoom.
by Rob Rothfarb • March 13, 2017
Using a software defined radio (SDR) and freely-available software, you can receive images directly from orbiting weather satellites.
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