Fun front end. Serious provenance.
CTG-derived scores are designed to be understandable, reproducible and clearly separated from government-source measurements.
Yard Stress Index
Formula: 45% heat stress + 35% U.S. Drought Monitor intensity + 20% forecast dryness.
Heat stress is based on the next 24-hour NWS forecast maximum. Drought intensity maps D0–D4 classifications to an increasing stress score. Forecast dryness inversely weights the maximum hourly probability of precipitation over the next 24 hours.
Tree Stress Index
Formula: 35% heat + 50% drought + 15% forecast dryness. Drought receives more weight because established tree stress often reflects prolonged water deficit, not just a single hot afternoon.
Landscape Water Need
Formula: 40% heat + 40% drought + 20% forecast dryness. This is deliberately described as pressure, not inches of irrigation and not legal permission to water.
Planting Conditions
A relative 0–100 establishment score that penalizes extreme heat and drought while modestly rewarding meaningful rain chances. It is a timing aid, not a horticultural guarantee.
Mosquito Potential
A weather-suitability model using temperature, humidity and precipitation probability. It is not a public-health risk model and is kept separate from surveillance notices.
CTG Plant Score
Plant scores combine summer heat tolerance, drought tolerance, Central Texas soil fit, freeze resilience, wildlife value and maintenance burden. These scores are editorial models. Each factor is published because the ranking should be debatable.
Watering rules
Watering law is never derived from CTG environmental scores. Utility rules are stored separately and only labeled verified when the automation recognizes expected language on the official utility source page. If parsing fails or the utility is unsupported, CTG directs users to the original utility source instead of guessing.
Update cadence
GitHub Actions refresh current data hourly. A second workflow archives a compact daily snapshot to the repository, creating an auditable historical series over time.
Versioning
Methodology changes increment the methodology version in the data payload. Historical snapshots keep the version that produced them.