Plaincast — the National Weather Service forecast, decoded into plain English

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 Salt Lake City, 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.

Area Forecast Discussion · National Weather Service Salt Lake City (SLC) · issued Friday, September 11 at 5:19 AM MDT.

Aviation

KSLC. Increased cloud cover, isolated shower chances, and associated potential for gusty erratic outflow winds will persist into late Friday morning. Winds otherwise follow a normal daily pattern, most likely shifting NW ~17-19Z. Cloud cover will then decrease through the day, with diurnally typical winds and good visual flying conditions conditions favored.

REST OF UTAH AND SOUTHWEST WYOMING. A weak grazing system will bring isolated shower chances to northern terminals through roughly late Friday morning, and isolated convection to southern terminals through Friday afternoon. Aside from the influence of precipitation, winds are expected to follow a diurnally typical pattern. good visual flying conditions conditions are also anticipated to continue, with cloud cover trending downward as moisture with the system decreases.

.FIRE WEATHER, Issued 228 AM MDT Fri Sep 11 2026. A weak grazing system will continue to push a correspondingly weak boundary into northern Utah into Friday morning, bringing increased moisture, cloud cover, and isolated shower chances. Isolated convective redevelopment is then expected across portions of southern Utah Friday afternoon.

Moving into the weekend, the next approaching system will bring increasing deep southwesterly flow. Winds will tend to increase, especially in unsheltered valley locations across western Utah, with daytime gusts around 25-40 mph. Models continue to fluctuate on timing of a cold frontal boundary with this system. In general, and especially if during the day, southwest winds will increase and become maximized ahead of this frontal passage, with a briefer period of gusty northwest winds likely following the front. Largely, this front is expected to by dry in nature with the best chance of precipitation noted across portions of eastern Utah where moisture is favored to be higher. An unsettled pattern will yield continued isolated to at times scattered convective chances along and east of Utah's high terrain through midweek. There is considerable uncertainty in if, and to what extent, tropical moisture may then combine with another system later in work week.

This is the plain-text edition, decoded without AI so it loads anywhere. Read the whole Salt Lake City discussion at /o/SLC/, 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