Plaincast
What the forecast actually says — NWS Area Forecast Discussions, decoded into plain English.
Plaincast decodes the National Weather Service's Area Forecast Discussion — the real forecast, written 3 to 4 times a day by the meteorologist on shift — into plain English. The discussion is where a forecaster explains their reasoning: which models disagree, what they are watching, and how confident they are. Below is the current edition for New Orleans, with its shorthand expanded. The full experience — an AI plain-English summary beside the annotated original — loads with JavaScript, and every one of the 68 forecast offices has its own edition.
Deep tropical moisture moving into the area is causing localized heavy rainfall and flooding across urban parts of the I-10/12 corridor.
This elevated risk for localized heavy rainfall leading to street flooding and overflowing of poor drainage will continue on Friday and into Saturday.
(Now through Monday) Issued at 119 AM CDT Fri Sep 11 2026
Rinse and repeat is the name of the game for today and tomorrow as a slow moving upper level trough axis slides through the Lower Mississippi Valley and Gulf South. A plume of deep tropical moisture will remain over the area through the period with PWATS running between the 90th percentile and daily max for mid- September both days. As temperatures warm into the mid to upper 80s, enough instability, as noted by SBCAPE of over 1000 J/KG, will be in place to support convective updraft development. Multiple rounds of shower and thunderstorm activity will develop in the vicinity of a weakening low centered over coastal Louisiana and then spread inland through the afternoon hours. Rainfall rates of 2 to 3 inches per hour will be common and storm motion will be 5 to 10 mph each day. The end result will be continued potential for localized flooding rainfall events to occur if storms become anchored and backbuild on weak mesoscale boundaries like the lakebreeze or seabreeze. If this occurs, these localized spots could easily see 3 to 5 inches of rainfall fall in short period of time. More urbanized areas with poor drainage or that are low lying will have the greatest impacts in the form of street flooding from these heavy rainfall events. Overall, the flooding will remain isolated and the region remains in a level 1 out of 5, marginal, risk of flash flooding today and tomorrow.
The upper level trough axis will shift to the east as we move into Sunday and Monday and a broad upper level high will start to shift toward the region from the west. As this high becomes more centered over the area, increasing negative vorticity advection and subsidence in the mid and upper levels of the atmosphere will lead to both drying and warming aloft. PWATS will fall to between the 75th and 90th percentile on Sunday and then further drop to between the median and 75th percentile by Monday. The lack of deep layer forcing aloft and weaker mid-level lapse rates will also help to inhibit convective development a bit. Any convection will tend to fire up more in the afternoon hours as temperatures climb into the lower 90s and the convective temperature is reached. The convection will also be more confined to pre-existing meso-scale boundaries like the seabreeze or remnant outflow boundaries resulting in more scattered coverage for both Sunday and Monday. Overall, a return to a more typical late Summer weather regime is expected as we move into the new week.
This is the plain-text edition, decoded without AI so it loads anywhere. Read the whole New Orleans discussion at /o/LIX/, see what changed since the last one, or open The National Desk for where the weather is today.
Data from the National Weather Service. Translated by Claude. About · For developers & agents · Subscribe: RSS feed for this office · Source on GitHub