NBM Explorer

The National Blend of Models is the National Weather Service's statistically post-processed, calibrated blend of many models — and it is the first guess every forecast office edits before the NDFD grids go out. So the pair is worth reading together: NBM is what the machines say, NDFD is what the forecasters signed.

That comparison only works if the two are the same instrument, so they deliberately are: the same 2.5 km class of grid, the same 179 CONUS domains and the same Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and Guam frames, the same breadcrumb, chips and compass, and — most importantly — the same colour ramps. A value that reads 87 on one page is the same colour on the other. Flip between the two tabs and any difference you see is a real difference in the forecast, not in the rendering.

The timeline is the same instrument too. Its axis is rebuilt for each element, because the blend's elements do not share a clock: temperature, dewpoint, wind, gusts, humidity and precipitation run hourly to 48 hours, then three- and six-hourly, while maximum and minimum temperature are one value a day across the whole run. The tick strip labels frames rather than clock times, so the labels thin out exactly where the cadence coarsens — and switching element keeps the valid time you were looking at rather than the period number, which would mean something quite different on the next element. Play at 0.5× to 8×; the setting sticks in this browser and MP4 and GIF exports come out at the speed you were watching.

The blend refreshes hourly and runs out to eleven days, far beyond the NDFD's seven, so it is also the longer-range half of the pair. Max and min temperature are the blend's own 12-hour extremes rather than maxima taken over hourly values.

Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico run on the blend's own grids. Alaska and Hawaii — 2.98 km polar stereographic and 2.5 km Mercator — are framed to the digit exactly as the NDFD page of the same name frames them, so the same place lands on the same pixel when you flip between the two. Puerto Rico is the sharpest map on this site: the blend runs that domain at 1.25 km, twice the resolution of everything else, and the frame is the whole domain out to the Virgin Islands. Guam covers the southern Marianas — Guam, Rota, Tinian and Saipan — and is the one map here on the far side of the date line.

Forecast Eagle is not an official source. For watches, warnings and advisories, always consult weather.gov.