Plaincast — the National Weather Service forecast, 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 Boise, 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 Boise (BOI) · issued Saturday, October 24 at 6:32 AM MDT.

Messages

Cool and dry this weekend, frost and freeze possible this morning and Sunday morning.

Seasonable temperatures with an unsettled pattern bringing a chance of rain and high mountain snow early next week.

Short Term

Issued 144 AM MDT SAT OCT 24 2026 Dry conditions will prevail through Sunday thanks to brief ridging over the area. Clearing skies and calmer winds will allow for good radiational cooling this morning, with lower elevation lows in the low to mid 30s. This will be the case again come Sunday morning, although increasing high clouds may act to hinder frost development. High temperatures today will be near normal, before warming to around 5 degrees above normal come Sunday afternoon with increasing southwesterly flow ahead of the next system.

Come Monday, the brief ridging the made for a dry weekend will breakdown ahead of the next trough digging into the Mountain West. High temperatures on Monday will be similar to that of Sunday, if not a couple degrees warmer. Precipitation chances will increase through Monday with breezy (gusts to 20-30 mph, strongest south and west of the Snake River Plain) west/southwest winds. The most active period appears to come late Monday into early Tuesday, especially over the Central ID Mountains. This system won't have as much of a moisture tap as the prior one, with forecasted rain amounts under a half an inch over the Central ID Mountains. A cold front late Monday will lower snow levels to 5-6kft above sea level, which will allow for some snow accumulations across higher terrain. Elevations above 6kft above sea level in the Central ID Mountains have a 40-70% chance of seeing at least an inch of snow. The current forecast carries 1-3 inches above 6kft above sea level (including Banner Summit), with up to 5 inches on the highest peaks.

This is the plain-text edition, decoded without AI so it loads anywhere. Read the whole Boise discussion at /o/BOI/, see what changed since the last one, or open The National Desk for where the weather is today.