Your Local Forecast Office
What the forecaster responsible for your airport actually said — in their own words.
Part of Synoptic Intelligence™
Available on every plan, including Free
The most useful weather product almost nobody reads
Four times a day, a meteorologist at each National Weather Service forecast office sits down and writes an Area Forecast Discussion — a plain-language explanation of what they think the weather is doing, why they think it, and where they are unsure. It is the reasoning behind the TAF rather than the TAF itself.
There are 123 offices issuing these across the US and its territories. PlaneWX reads all of them and pulls out the one thing a pilot most wants from a discussion: the boundary the office is tracking, and what they expect it to do.
Why it matters: a TAF tells you a wind will shift at 18Z. The discussion tells you it shifts because a cold front arrives, that the forecaster is not confident in the timing, and that the front may stall before it reaches you. Same weather, very different decision.
Where you'll see it
On your home airport card
A short line naming the boundary your office is tracking and where it stands relative to now — approaching, moving through, or already past. Underneath it, the forecaster's own sentence, quoted directly.
Your local forecast office
Omaha/Valley, NE (OAX) · issued 3h ago
A cold front has moved through your area.
“Front is now south of the area with drier air filtering in behind it.”
The office name links to that office's own weather.gov page, where you can read the full discussion.
In your morning digest
The same read, in the email, so you have it before you open the app.
In your trip briefings
Your briefing uses the office's read rather than a generic assumption about how fast fronts move. Two things change as a result:
- •Front status is resolved against your departure time, not against right now. A front that is approaching this afternoon may already be past by the time you leave tomorrow morning, and the briefing says so.
- •Departure window suggestions are framed around the real boundary — leaving ahead of it, or waiting for it to clear — instead of a generic “conditions improve later”.
What we take from each discussion
Boundary type
Cold, warm, stationary or occluded front, dryline, outflow boundary, or trough
Where it stands
Approaching, moving through, or already past — resolved against your departure time
Direction and speed
Which way the office says it is moving
Timing
The window the office gives, when they give one
Their confidence
Whether the forecaster hedged the timing, so we can hedge too
Whether it reaches you
Some boundaries stall or weaken before arriving — see below
The front that never arrives
A front on the map near your airport does not mean a front is coming to your airport. Forecasters write about boundaries they expect to stall, weaken, or slide by to the north. So we read whether the office actually expects it to reach your area, and when they don't, we say that plainly rather than putting you on one side of it:
A cold front is nearby, but the office does not expect it to reach your area.
“A cold front currently spanning the northern TX Panhandle shows no sign of reaching our area.”
When that happens, your briefing will not suggest leaving ahead of the front or waiting for it to clear, because there is no passage to plan around. It will describe the day-to-day change in the airmass instead.
What we won't claim
About two days, then it's models
Discussions look roughly 48 hours ahead for boundary timing. Past that, your outlook comes from model guidance, and we will not stretch a forecaster's words across a week they never covered.
Every quote is checked against the published text
The sentence we show you is matched against the actual discussion before it is displayed. If it doesn't appear in the product, it doesn't appear on your card. You are reading the forecaster, not a summary of the forecaster.
A quiet office says nothing
On a settled day there is often no boundary to report, and the card will say so. We would rather show you an honest “nothing to flag” than invent a front for the sake of having something to say.
We tell you how old it is
Every card carries the issuance age. Once a discussion has been superseded, we shift to past tense — “as of this morning’s discussion” — rather than presenting stale reasoning as current.
Coverage
All 123 NWS offices that issue Area Forecast Discussions, covering the continental US, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Guam and American Samoa. Your airport is matched to the office responsible for it.
Every NWS forecast office, on weather.govThe NWS directory of all forecast offices. Useful for finding the office covering an airport you don't normally fly out of, or for reading a neighbouring office's take when a boundary sits between two of them and they don't quite agree.Airports outside NWS coverage — Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean beyond US territories, and everywhere else — have no Area Forecast Discussion, so the card simply doesn't appear. Your briefing still uses every other product available for those airports.
Discussions are re-read eight times a day, so a newly issued discussion reaches you within a few hours of the forecaster writing it.