How the call gets made.

Is it worth heading to the pickleball courts at Miami Beach Golf Club?

Court hours and directions

Daily, 6am–midnight (Miami time). Hours may change for holidays or closures.

Get directions to 2301 Alton Road, Miami Beach

Weather, surface, and space to play

We compare National Weather Service hourly forecasts with Open-Meteo’s forecast and check local NWS alerts. A scheduled Cloudflare browser captures the city’s public livestream. Cloudflare Workers AI estimates visible court occupancy and surface condition.

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What “looking good” means

A favorable recommendation needs a fresh, usable camera image suggesting dry courts, both forecast sources showing low rain risk, and a current alert check. The current-condition window is capped at three hours, with a 30-minute buffer before an hourly forecast’s rising rain risk. Source agreement is not statistical confidence: weather providers can share model inputs.

Planning your visit

We show four sessions, allowing 20 minutes for travel. We compare time available to play, rain, wind and gusts, heat, UV, and typical busy hours. Current camera counts apply only to the current session. Busy and quiet periods come from local guidance rather than measured queue history.

A scheduled AI writer turns those facts into short session descriptions. Page visits never trigger AI calls. Descriptions expire with the underlying data, and a factual fallback appears when the writer is unavailable. Radar informs the next 30 minutes; later sessions rely on forecasts.

A light breeze can be a plus: we favor roughly 3–8 mph with modest gusts. At 10–14 mph, expect some adjustment; 15–19 mph makes touch shots harder, and 20+ mph often spoils normal play. Gusts of 20+ mph can also make control difficult. These are practical playing preferences, not official cancellation rules, informed by Pickleball Union and The Dink. UV of 3 or more prompts sunscreen advice. Heat, wet courts, missing data, and active weather alerts also inform recommendations.

Rain at these courts

Seven NOAA radar scans over the past hour are checked within 1 km of the venue. This is rain radar, not cloud cover. Color bands give qualitative echo intensity, not measured millimetres of rainfall. Brief showers can occur between scans, and transparent areas can mean no echoes or missing coverage.

When echo movement agrees across three scans, we extrapolate that movement for at most 30 minutes. If the pattern is too sparse, changes direction, or cannot be matched confidently, no arrival estimate is shown. New showers can form or intensify faster than this method predicts. A fresh dry camera plus clear local radar supports a short, 20-minute check-in window despite a spotty-shower forecast. Rain over the court area or a visibly wet surface takes precedence.

Recent rain echoes, observed wetness, humidity, sun, and temperature inform a broad drying estimate. A fresh camera must still confirm that the surface looks dry; radar alone cannot tell us the state of the acrylic court. We do not measure lightning proximity.

People counts and wait times

Counts are approximate and limited to what the camera sees. Open courts are reported when visible; a hidden queue stays unknown. A numerical wait range requires a visible queue and assumes 30-minute competitive games, four-on/four-off play, and a shared queue across 6 courts. Up to one extra rotation allows for games already in progress. Rotation assumptions have not been verified locally. We do not identify or track individual people.

Drying estimates

Drying windows are broad, experimental estimates based on visible wetness, humidity, cloud cover, time of day, and the forecast. They are not a trained court-specific model yet. A camera check is still required before wet courts become a favorable recommendation.

Fresh inputs, honest gaps

Checks run every five minutes, with forecasts reused for about 20 minutes and fewer camera captures overnight. Camera readings expire after 12 minutes; weather forecasts after 45 minutes; alert checks after 15 minutes. If a source fails, its old timestamp is preserved.

We retain structured observations for 30 days and issued predictions for 90 days to support future accuracy checks. Only the latest court image is stored. Nothing here currently claims a calibrated confidence percentage.

Sources

• City of Miami Beach public camera
• National Weather Service
• Weather data by Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0; noncommercial use)
• NOAA / NWS radar

Radar and people detection

We also inspect a timestamped NOAA radar image within 40 km of the courts. Colored echoes within 15 km downgrade the recommendation. Transparent radar pixels may mean no echo or missing coverage, so a blank image alone never means clear weather. This is proximity detection, not a prediction of storm motion.

We count all visible people using three video frames at least two seconds apart, with a full-frame detector and overlapping crops that enlarge the distant courts. Duplicate detections are removed and people must appear in multiple frames. Courts in use are estimated by dividing the people count by four, rounding up, and capping at the number of courts. This does not identify which courts are occupied. Extra people beyond the playing capacity form a possible queue; rough waits assume 30-minute games and four-on/four-off rotation. Spectators can inflate the estimate, hidden people can be missed, and actual rotation rules may differ.

Redacted images only

Raw frames are used transiently for analysis. Rounded head/face regions are blurred before the image is saved or published, leaving bodies visible so nearby people remain distinguishable. Masks include low-confidence detections excluded from the count. If detection or redaction fails, no new image is saved. Automated masks can miss undetected people or unusually positioned heads.