How this site works

This site tracks real daily fish counts recorded at sonar and weir counting stations across Alaska, then uses years of that history to project how a season is likely to unfold.

During the season, each river's page shows the actual daily counts recorded so far alongside a projected count for the same days, based on how previous seasons typically played out by that same date. This lets you compare this year's pace against history in real time.

Before a season starts, the site builds a full day-by-day projection for the upcoming year using historical timing patterns alone, since there's no current-season data yet to go on.

Finding the best settings: a projection can be built several different ways — which years to draw from, how to average them, whether to exclude unusually large or small years, and more. For many rivers, the site has already tested 72 different combinations of these settings against 15 years of real, already-known seasons to find the combination that would have predicted each one most accurately, and uses that automatically. Rivers that don't yet have enough years of history on record show a notice that generic default settings are in use instead.

You can also adjust every setting yourself — years of history to use, averaging method, outlier exclusion, uncertainty ranges, trend adjustment, and date alignment — to see how the projection responds.

A note on accuracy: these are historical-timing-based statistical estimates, not guaranteed forecasts. Treat them as a rough planning aid rather than a promise of what you'll see on the water.