i can see clearly now

Here's a really excellent weather forecast graphic that the NOAA website has been producing for ages. I haven't found anyone else who makes one as useful. To find yours, go to weather.gov (easier to remember than to bookmark), put in your zip code, and search the forecast page for the word "hourly."

I talk frequently about my wise who says "I believe weather reports, like 'it rained.'" But if I want to dissect how much to believe a forecast, this is the best one. Let's break it down.

This is a two-day hourly forecast, with Wednesday afternoon and evening on the left and Friday on the right. Notice the background. White background is local daytime; dark background is local night.

Top panel is temperatures: real temperature, wind chill, and dew point. (In the summer there's a heat index line rather than a wind chill line.) I have started to think that knowing the temperature and the dew point is a better bit of information about how humid it'll feel than just knowing the relative humidity.

Second panel is winds. The dots on the curve show the wind speed, and the little tails show the direction. If there are going to be gusts, an additional trace appears.

Third panel: relative humidity, precipitation potential, and sky cover. Sky cover is a quantitative way to say "cloudy or clear."

The bottom five panels are bar charts showing the qualitative probability, hour by hour, of different types of precipitation. Rain in green; thunder in red; snow in blue; ice in purple; sleet in orange. In summer only the "rain" and "thunder" panels are shown.

This is tons of information. But look at how illustrative it is for this particular forecast. Wednesday overnight into Thursday it's going to be cold and damp, whether it rains continuously or intermittently. The chance of rain is going to taper down on Thursday night, but any precipitation is going to turn into snow in the wee dark hours of Friday as we have a hard freeze. Friday morning will be dangerous, with Thursday's cool wet places turned to ice.

Folks around here are apparently excited about the potential for snow after Friday. But here's a graphic showing that's the wrong part of the week to plan for.