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 Seattle, 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.
A series of frontal systems will bring a return of widespread rain and occasionally windy conditions today through the weekend. A trend toward drier and cooler conditions are expected toward the middle portion of next week as the storm track shifts south of Western Washington.
Rain is spreading onto the coast this morning ahead of the first of a couple frontal systems that will impact the region in the days ahead. Along with the rain, breezy to locally windy conditions will develop along the coast, the North Interior, and near the Cascade gaps. A combination of high tide and lower atmospheric pressure will contribute to minor to moderate coastal flooding today as well. Larger seas building to around 20 feet will reach the coast where a high surf advisory remains in effect. Rain will turn to showers by tonight as an upper trough axis shifts onshore.
A second and stronger frontal system will move into the area later Saturday into Saturday night. expected rainfall remains in the same ballpark as previous estimates with around 1.5 to 2 inches for much of the coast, 3+ inches on the south facing slopes of the Olympics, and somewhere between 0.50 and 1 inch for much of the interior lowlands. the blend-of-models forecast probabilities of wind gusts exceeding 50 mph along portions of the coast are around 60 to 80 percent for Saturday afternoon/evening with another bullseye of 50 to 60 percent probabilities near the east entrance to the strait later Saturday night. Elsewhere, peak wind gusts Saturday night will be roughly 30 to 40 mph. Post-frontal showers continue into Sunday with winds easing.
This is the plain-text edition, decoded without AI so it loads anywhere. Read the whole Seattle discussion at /o/SEW/, 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