About this site

Last updated: August 9, 2026

Who writes it

My name is Ross Salimov. I build MigrAid, a migraine tracker for iOS, and I write and research everything on this site. I am the founder of Salimov Studios, the one person company behind the app.

I am not a doctor, and nothing here is medically reviewed. I want that stated plainly at the top rather than buried in a footer, because the internet has enough health writing that implies clinical authority it does not have. What I have instead is a specific and narrow kind of experience: I built the tool that records this data, I read the primary literature I cite, and I compute the weather figures on this site myself rather than repeating numbers from other blogs.

Where the weather figures come from

Every pressure figure on the city pages is measured, not estimated. For each city I pull three years of hourly surface pressure readings from the Open-Meteo historical archive and compute four things from them: the mean, the storm low, the typical range of daily swings, and which months are most volatile. Nothing is rounded to a nicer number and nothing is guessed.

Two details matter for reading those numbers correctly. The figures are surface pressure rather than sea level pressure, so elevation shifts the entire baseline: Denver sits near 840 hPa and Cheyenne near 814, and in Europe St. Gallen reads 938 against Hamburg's 1013. A reading that would signal a deep storm at the coast is an ordinary day in the mountains. And the research consistently finds that change matters more than absolute value, which is why the pages emphasise the size of the swing rather than the number itself.

Before trusting this method I checked it against figures that had been written by hand for the original city pages. The computed value for Denver came out at 839.5 against a stated 840, and New York's storm low at 993.5 against 995. That agreement is why the same method was then used for every city added since.

How sources are chosen

Articles cite the primary study wherever one exists, with the journal named, rather than a secondary summary. Where a claim comes from a patient organisation such as the American Migraine Foundation or the National Headache Foundation, that is what gets cited, and it is not dressed up as a clinical trial. Every source is listed at the foot of the article it supports.

When the evidence is weak or mixed, the article says so. Weather is a good example: it is a commonly reported migraine trigger, named by 53.2 percent of 1,207 patients in one Cephalalgia study, which put it fourth behind stress, hormones and skipped meals. A meaningful number of people who assume they are weather sensitive turn out not to be, and finding that out is a useful result rather than a disappointing one.

What this site is not

It is not a diagnostic tool and it does not provide medical advice. The forecast pages estimate how much the atmosphere is about to move, scored against conditions that research has linked to attacks in weather sensitive people. That is not the same as predicting that you will get a migraine, and the pages are written to avoid implying otherwise. If your headaches are new, changing in pattern, or severe, that is a conversation for a doctor rather than a website.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, I would rather know. Corrections and questions go to support@migraid.app, and I fix errors on the page itself rather than quietly.