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 Los Angeles, 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.
Rain is expected in most areas tonight and off and on through early Saturday morning. Dry weather is expected the rest of the weekend. Additional rain is likely on Monday and again next Thursday. High temperatures will be mostly in the 60s, except 40s and 50s in the mountains.
Overall, latest models in good synoptic agreement through the short term period. Essentially, there will be several "pulses" of rainfall across the area today through Sunday.
The first "impulse" of rain is currently impacting the area as an upper low continues to take a over water trajectory, heading into northern Baja later this morning. Scattered showers developed last evening and continue across the area this morning. Based on gauge data, rainfall rates have generally been under 0.25 inches/hour, but some local rates around 0.50 inches/hour have been observed. Fortunately, the showers are moving rather quickly, limiting the potential significant hydrologic impact. This shower activity will continue through the morning, before tapering from northwest to southeast this afternoon. Although no lightning has been observed so far, still enough instability to warrant a slight chance of thunderstorms through this morning.
The second "impulse," a more classic cold front, will begin to move into San Luis Obispo county later this afternoon and will sweep southeast across the area tonight/Saturday morning. This front will bring a 3-5 hour period of light to moderate rainfall. Fortunately, the instability looks much less, so any thunderstorm threat is very minimal. Rainfall rates will likely continue to be around 0.25 inches/hour or less with isolated rates around 0.50 inches/hour. By Saturday afternoon, the front will be east of the area and the rainfall threat with it will end.
Overall, rainfall totals through Saturday morning are expected to range between 0.25 and 0.75 inches for most areas. However, there may be isolated totals around 1.00, associated with areas that experience heavier showers or a thunderstorm.
From Saturday afternoon through Sunday evening, dry conditions are expected. However, beginning Sunday night, yet another system will begin to impact the area.
This is the plain-text edition, decoded without AI so it loads anywhere. Read the whole Los Angeles discussion at /o/LOX/, 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