EXIT 1THE MODEL ROOM

Forecast Models

Everywhere else on weather.city you get the forecast for a place. This is the room the forecast came out of: the raw numerical guidance, drawn as maps you can animate, zoom and probe. Seven products from NOAA, the National Weather Service and NASA — the hourly convection model a forecaster watches all afternoon, the official grids the NWS signs its name to, the statistical blend underneath them, the analysis you check yesterday's forecast against, and two global models that run out ten days. Every map states the cycle it came from and the hour it is valid.

FORECAST EAGLE The model room runs on its own machine, at forecasteagle.com — same signage, same colours, same rule about stating the cycle. Where weather.city covers places, Eagle covers the models behind them. OPEN FORECAST EAGLE ↗

PRODUCTS

7

NOAA, NWS & NASA

FRESHEST CYCLE

—

reading the manifest…

STILLS REFRESHED

—

every twenty minutes

FINEST GRID

2.5 km

NDFD, NBM & RTMA

FURTHEST OUT

11 days

the National Blend

COST

$0

no account, no paywall

The Seven

LIVE · LATEST CYCLE OF EACH

Reading the latest model cycles from Forecast Eagle…

Which Model, and When

A SHORT ROAD SIGN

If the question is…	Reach for	Because
Will that storm reach me before dinner?	HRRR ↗	A new run every hour at 3 km, on a fifteen-minute axis. Nothing else here resolves an individual thunderstorm.
What is the actual forecast for my town?	NDFD ↗	The National Weather Service's own gridded forecast — the one a human forecaster signed. It is also what every city page on weather.city serves.
What do the machines say, before anyone edits them?	NBM ↗	The National Blend of Models is the first guess each forecast office starts from. Read it against the NDFD and the difference is the forecaster's judgement.
Was yesterday's forecast any good?	RTMA ↗	Not a forecast at all — NOAA's hourly 2.5 km estimate of what the surface weather actually was, thirty days back. The thing you verify against.
What about next weekend?	GFS ↗	NOAA's global model, ten days out, drawn from the flux files at 13 km rather than the usual 25.
Why is the sky orange, and where is that dust from?	GEOS ↗	NASA's global model is the only one here that forecasts aerosol — Saharan dust crossing the Atlantic — and the only one with 500 hPa heights and the jet.
What replaces the HRRR?	RRFS ↗	The Rapid Refresh Forecast System, running in parallel with the model it is built to succeed. Same grid as the HRRR, so flipping tabs shows a real difference in the forecast.

What Else Is in the Room

ON EVERY EXPLORER

Compare & verify

Swipe two products against each other, or subtract one from the other — including a forecast against the RTMA analysis of what happened.

Point view

Click any city and get its whole series through the run as a chart, and the same numbers as a CSV.

The alert overlay

Live NWS watches and warnings drawn over any model map, plus a standalone alerts map ↗.

Real zoom

The NWS pre-renders each sector at a fixed extent. These are real maps — one raster serves every domain and keeps going past the boundary.

The colour library

Every ramp on the site is published ↗, with a builder ↗ for making your own.

An honest status board

Which ingest is late ↗, and whether the gap is upstream at NOAA or ours.

Back on Weather.city

WHERE THE FORECAST COMES FROM

Every city page here is NDFD. The forecast on a weather.city page is the National Weather Service's own gridded forecast for that point — not a model of ours, and not a blend we invented. The NBM runs alongside it as a cross-check: it is the dashed second line on the meteogram and the second opinion under the seven-day, so you can see where the machines and the forecaster disagree. Precipitation amounts follow the NDFD for the first two days and the NBM after that, because the NDFD's QPF grids run out around day two. When the two lines diverge, that is a real forecast uncertainty — and the place to go look at the model maps.

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