Strava power couple just launched a new app for San Francisco

On the heels of the Bay Area’s “June Gloom,” a new fog tracking app aptly called Foggy launched on Monday, just in time for the Fourth of July.

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Michael Horvath, co-founder of the popular fitness app Strava, created Foggy with his wife and business partner, MacBeth Horvath. The couple, who also started the parent software company Nyfik, have a home in San Francisco’s notoriously foggy Outer Sunset neighborhood. 

The app pulls from publicly available satellite weather data, in a similar way as local sites such as Fog Today, but it also includes an innovative feature that allows users to report their real-time observations of the fog.

“The way people talk about fog is so lyrical, if you will,” Michael Horvath told SFGATE. “They want to use words that you don’t normally associate with wind or temperature. Bringing that out in the experience not only helps us to be more accurate, but it also makes it a lot more joyful for the people who are using it.”

Foggy, which costs a one-time fee of $5.99 to download, compiles data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s GOES satellite, which flies at an elevation of about 22,000 feet southeast of Hawaii. It also incorporates air temperature and humidity data from the NOAA Storm Prediction Center, which releases a weather balloon from the Oakland airport twice per day up to about 90,000 feet.

But these widely used satellite images can have trouble accurately showing fog, loosely defined as the clouds that touch the ground, in the Bay Area’s microclimates. To address that gap, Foggy also shares the descriptions from users, keeping them anonymous. 

Matt Mehle, a lead meteorologist at the weather service’s Bay Area office, told SFGATE that it’s more difficult to diagnose fog versus clouds in complex, hilly terrain like in the Bay Area.

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“From space, we see that there are clouds, and sometimes it’s hard to tell if that cloud is on the ground or if it’s elevated,” Mehle said.“It’s not like we’re in Kansas, where it might be flat, so moisture that’s forming a cloud at like 500 feet will be off the ground. Here in the Bay Area,if we have a cloud of 500 feet, it might be above you at Embarcadero. But you go up toward Coit [Tower] and some other spots, you might be in it, so then it will be considered fog.”

Logan Williams, who started Fog Today about a decade ago and works as an adviser to the Foggy team, said that the app provides a new outlet for the strong emotions that Bay Area residents have about fog. He often hears from visitors of Fog Today about how they track the fog for all kinds of activities, including paragliding, road biking, bird watching and photographs of important life moments. 

“Running Fog Today, I got all of these emails over and over again from people that have these really individual relationships with the fog,” he said. “You know some people could never live in the Sunset, while others love waking up to the cool gray mist every morning.”

The Horvaths, who met while working together at Strava, recently got married. But MacBeth, who is leading design for Foggy, has so far kept her own place on the “sunny side” of the city in the Dogpatch, too.