The Monument Independent has published a tool that forecasts which upcoming concerts at the Ford Amphitheater are most likely to be heard in the neighborhoods north of the venue. It is built from every show the amphitheater has held since it opened, the hour-by-hour weather over each of those nights, and 737 complaints filed by residents. It is free, it updates twice a day without anyone touching it, and it is candid about how often it is likely to be wrong.
The tool Ford Amphitheater Sound Forecast Which upcoming concerts are most likely to be heard in the neighborhoods north of the venue — with the wind, the map and the reasoning behind each call. Updated twice a day. Open the forecast →It sits alongside BoardWatch and the Tri-Lakes food truck tracker under a new Trackers section, reachable from the main menu.
What It Does
For each upcoming show, the forecast gives a propagation risk — low through high — and shows the reasoning behind it. A map plots every complaint filed on the resident-run noise map since September 2024, and draws that night’s forecast wind as a cone from the venue: where the air is expected to carry sound, how strongly, and how much the direction shifts across the evening.
Two things drive the forecast, and only two.
The first is wind direction — specifically the component of the wind blowing from the venue toward the center of the complaint field, which sits north-northeast. Across the 50 performance dates the complaint map has been open for, that measure correlates with complaint volume at +0.43. Wind speed on its own correlates at +0.05, which is to say not at all. Recomputed from Air Force Academy airfield readings alone, with no weather model involved, the directional figure is +0.41. Cloud cover and temperature are likewise flat.
That combination is what makes the finding worth trusting. A pleasant summer evening brings people outdoors, and people outdoors hear more; if complaints were merely tracking nice weather, warmth and clear skies would show it. They do not. Only the directional term moves.
The second is the low-frequency content of the act, taken from its genre. Bass travels furthest, penetrates walls most readily, and is the least affected by barriers — which is why it dominates complaints about outdoor concerts everywhere, not only here. The categories and the numbers behind them come from a 2024 paper in the Proceedings of the Institute of Acoustics, which publishes measured octave-band spectra for four kinds of amplified popular music.
What It Found on the Way
Three results emerged from building it that were not obvious beforehand.
Wind direction matters more than the act. On the 29 dates when the wind carried toward the neighborhoods, the venue averaged 21.0 submissions. On the 21 dates it blew the other way, 3.7.
Rock is not the loud category. Intuition says metal and hard rock are the problem. The record says otherwise: across the 50 dates the median submission count ran urban and hip-hop 21, dance 17.5, pop 8, alt and rock 3, and acoustic or orchestral 0 — though the top two categories rest on six shows and two respectively. Rock does hold the single worst night in the record — Godsmack in October 2024, with 117 complaints — but that was also the most strongly downwind evening of that season, with a temperature inversion overhead. It is a story about variance, not volume.
The same emission can produce very different nights. Three acts have hit the venue’s front-of-house limit in the 40 Hz band, the one that carries. Godsmack drew 117 complaints. 311 drew 24. Three 6 Mafia drew 16. What separated them was the weather.
What It Does Not Do
It forecasts complaints, not decibels. It measures who chose to report, which is not the same as who was disturbed — a distinction the acoustics literature is blunt about, and one that cuts against the tool as much as for it.
It ranks nights rather than predicting a number. Held-out testing puts the correlation between forecast and outcome at +0.42. That separates busy nights from quiet ones better than chance, and no more than that.
And it can be wrong in a specific, visible way. On August 18 the forecast for the 28th read 5.3 mph carrying toward the neighborhoods at 9:56 in the morning, and 6.0 mph carrying away by lunchtime — a swing of roughly 135 degrees between two model runs, ten days ahead. Both figures were the best available when they were computed. Neither was an error. That is simply what a ten-day wind forecast is worth, and every card on the page now shows how much its own forecast has been moving, so a reader can see the difference between a settled night and a coin flip.
Where the Data Comes From
The complaint locations are collected by the Ford Amphitheater noise map, a project run by an area resident and unaffiliated with this newspaper. It is advocacy-aligned — it solicits donations for legal action against the venue — and it permits one report per exact location, so its counts are a mix of incidents and addresses.
The Independent uses it because there is no alternative. No downloadable public complaint dataset exists. The city’s own records sit across several systems, and this newspaper has open-records requests pending for them. If those requests produce usable data, it will be added and the crowdsourced set will become a check on it rather than the foundation of it.
Weather comes from Open-Meteo and is refreshed twice daily by scheduled job. The concert schedule comes from the venue’s own published calendar.
The forecast also gets better as the record grows. Every model in this piece rests on 50 performance dates, which is not many, and the thinnest categories rest on far fewer — two dance shows, six urban ones. Residents who are actually hearing the venue and who file a report, either to the resident-run map or through the city’s own GoCOS system, are adding to the only public record of what this venue does at a distance.
Two cautions on that, and they matter more than the invitation. Report what you experienced, not what you expect — a dataset inflated by reports filed on principle is worth less than a smaller honest one, and this newspaper would rather have the smaller honest one. And the city’s system is the one with legal weight; the resident map is a private project, however useful. The Independent has no stake in the number of complaints filed and takes no position on the venue’s future. It has a stake in the record being accurate.
What Comes Next
A fuller examination of the venue’s noise record — the measurements taken, the mitigation built, and what the public documents do and do not establish — is scheduled for publication on Thursday, August 20, subject to what those records requests return.
Corrections and challenges are welcome, particularly on the classification of individual acts, which is the softest input in the model and is shown on every card for exactly that reason. Write to [email protected].
Update, August 21, 2026. The figures in this article have been revised. The analysis originally ran on all 62 performances the venue has held; it now uses the 50 dates the resident complaint map was open for, since the twelve earlier shows recorded no submissions for reasons unrelated to sound. A separate error, which credited some submissions to two consecutive shows at once, has also been corrected. Both changes strengthened the reported relationships: wind moved from +0.42 to +0.43 and low-frequency content from +0.40 to +0.51. The held-out figure is now stated with its method, which the earlier +0.274 was not. The forecast tool has been updated to match.
Sources & further reading
The Independent’s own coverage: Follow the Money: Buc-ee’s, the Ford Amphitheater Network and the 2026 Commissioner Races, which traced the money around the venue’s owners · BoardWatch, the vote trackers this tool now sits beside
The tool and its inputs: Ford Amphitheater sound forecast · Ford Amphitheater noise map, the resident-run complaint project · Open-Meteo · the venue’s published schedule
Acoustics: Fiumicelli, Parker, Lawrence and Stewart, Low Frequency Sound at Outdoor Concerts — A Necessary Noise, Proceedings of the Institute of Acoustics, Vol. 46 Pt. 2, 2024
City record: City of Colorado Springs Ford Amphitheater project page
Methodology
The forecast is fitted on the 50 performance dates for which the resident-operated complaint map was open, between September 2024 and August 2026, joined to 737 reports retrieved in full from that map on August 16, 2026. The venue has held 62 performances in total; the twelve that predate the map record no submissions for reasons unrelated to sound and are excluded. Reports migrated from an earlier version of that map, and those marked by its operator as test entries, were excluded.
Hourly weather for each concert window was drawn from the Open-Meteo Historical Forecast API at roughly three-kilometer resolution. The downwind component is the wind vector projected onto the bearing from the venue to the vector-mean of all 737 cleaned complaint locations, 18.8 degrees. Model weather was validated against Air Force Academy airfield observations from the Iowa Environmental Mesonet archive across 237 paired hours, where the downwind component correlated at 0.86.
Each act’s low-frequency class is taken from its genre using the four categories in Fiumicelli and colleagues, measured as LC−LA, the difference between C-weighted and A-weighted sound level and the standard index of bass content: dance 18 dB, urban 16, pop and rock 12. Assigning an act to a genre remains editorial judgment and is published on each card. An act not yet classified is treated as medium rather than assigned an extreme.
Complaint counts are normalized within season before fitting, because reporting effort drifts between years and raw counts are not comparable across them. Statistics are Spearman rank correlations. Held-out testing across the 50 dates gives a correlation between forecast and outcome of +0.42. The method is leave-one-out: each night’s expected count is the median of the other nights sharing its score, so no night contributes to its own prediction. Not modeled: attendance, stage volume, day of week, the venue’s own real-time level adjustments, and drifting reporting effort within a season.
The venue’s coordinate is not published in any document reviewed and was derived by trilateration from residents’ stated distances, with a root-mean-square error of 0.09 miles.