The winds, they are (always) a changin'

While I'm trusting my phone to tell me the final GPS coordinates of the payload, it's helpful to know the general area in which it will land.  Not only for reasons of finding it but also for planning.  If I launched the balloon from my condo, for example, it would end up way out in the Pacific past Catalina.  Not ideal.  Thankfully there are a few online trajectory predictors out there which can help with this.

The best one is CUSF Landing Predictor 2.0 provided by the University of Cambridge. The preset locations are all in England, but you can input any starting coordinates you want (as well as ascent and decent rates too).  Once the simulation is done, the flight path is overlaid onto Google Maps.  And if you want, the raw data can be exported as CSV or KML files.

Because the exact wind patterns are always changing, I won't really know my exact starting point until the day before the launch.  My target landing area is still Riverside/Moreno Valley.  Not many mountains or people to deal with, and I'd like to avoid LAX traffic for obvious reasons.  And there are plenty more chances of landing in a field were recovery is easiest. Since I'm really at the mercy of the winds, I very well might delay the launch until the winds are the way I like them.