About wxexplained

There's a lot of weather information you never see. Besides the forecast on your phone, the National Weather Service publishes its forecasters' own discussion of what they expect and how sure they are, hazard outlooks, and severe-storm and flood outlooks from its national centers. Most of it is written for meteorologists.

wxexplained brings those sources together and explains the weather in terms you can understand.

How a page is made

• When the NWS Kansas City office issues a discussion with new forecast text, an AI model (Claude, by Anthropic) writes the plain version from it, the discussion before it and the latest Hazardous Weather Outlook.
• Every statement carries the NWS sentences it comes from. Code checks that each quote and number is really in the NWS text.
• A second pass checks that nothing was added, made more or less alarming, left out or misread, and a third that every limit the NWS gives (where, when, if, maybe) is kept.
• A page that fails is never shown. The NWS text is shown instead, with the reason.

What the site never does

• Rewrite a watch, warning or advisory: those always appear in the NWS's own words.
• Add numbers, places or times that aren't in the NWS products.
• Show an older plain version as the current one.

The forecast numbers come straight from the NWS point forecasts. The outlook levels come from the Storm Prediction Center and the Weather Prediction Center.

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