Every day in the hills tells us something.

Why take part?

The Mountain Decisions Project is run by Mountain Weather. We are learning how people use weather information, what they encounter and what they notice. Findings will inform our forecasts, product design and weather communication. This is product research, not an academic study or a test of your judgement.

Your choice, one answer at a time

Participation is for adults aged 18 or over. By submitting an answer, you consent to its use for this project. Each answer is saved separately. Follow-ups are optional: you can skip them or stop at any point. Taking part has no effect on access to forecasts. Please submit each experience only once.

What we collect

We count daily question invitations by module and registered referral source, without attaching a contribution or visitor identifier. Repeated views can count more than once. We store your answers, the exact question version and choice order, times, the route you chose, and a registered referral source if you used a partner link. We record which follow-up questions are displayed, answered or skipped, and when you choose Done. Where the browser reports it, we also record when the page is hidden, left or returned to. These signals can be missed, and hiding a page does not necessarily mean you stopped taking part. If a question is attached to a forecast, we also record the forecast reference and relevant conditions shown. On this standalone page, there is no linked forecast.

We do not ask for your name, email address or account. A random contribution reference links your answers within this visit. Please do not include names, organisations, exact places or dates, contact details, medical details or other identifying information.

Storage and deletion

Receipts are kept in this browser tab so you can delete your contributions, including after reloading. These receipts expire when the tab is closed. Reload to manage earlier contributions saved in this tab. To withdraw while it is available, use “Delete my contribution” after answering. We cannot reliably locate your answers by name or email after the receipt is lost. A minimal deletion receipt, without answers, is kept until the original retention period ends so a delayed retry cannot recreate your contribution. Fully anonymised summaries already published cannot be withdrawn.

We retain contributions for up to 12 months, then delete the individual records from the working database. Restricted hosting backups expire on the hosting provider's backup cycle. Deleted or expired contributions must not be brought back into research if a backup is restored. Temporary security counters use a daily changing keyed address hash and are removed after one day. The research dataset does not contain IP addresses. Hosting providers may separately process technical access logs, as described in our site privacy notice. This page uses locally hosted fonts and no advertising or third-party analytics.

A small record on this device remembers recent participation to reduce repeat invitations. It contains no answers and is not used to recognise you across devices. The public research page remains available whenever you choose to visit.

Who sees the responses?

Mountain Weather uses individual responses for analysis. We will publish summaries of the findings on this website, freely available for anyone to read and use. Each report will explain the methods, the responses included and the limitations of the findings, to help outdoor users and organisations interpret the results. We do not publish raw stories, identifiable details or individual responses, and sharing a project link does not give a partner access to them. Contact simon@mountainweather.co.uk for questions about this project or your data rights. You can also raise a data protection concern with the ICO.

How we will interpret the findings

This is an open, voluntary sample. Results describe people who chose to answer, not all hill users. Personal expectations, recalled forecast comparisons, intended actions and directly observed events are different forms of evidence and will be analysed separately. Accounts about other people cannot establish their motives or how common a behaviour is.

We will report wording, versions, recruitment sources, dates, the number answering each question and missing responses alongside any findings. Skips are not “no” answers. No answer or community result establishes that an activity is safe. A partner sharing the link does not imply endorsement, academic review or independent oversight.

The questionnaire design follows principles described by Pew Research Center and AAPOR. Before wider outreach, we will pilot the wording and usability with a range of hill users.