NDFD Graphical Forecast

The National Digital Forecast Database is the National Weather Service's official gridded forecast — the same numbers behind every point forecast on weather.gov, prepared by forecasters at the local offices rather than produced directly by a model.

This page mirrors the NWS's own graphical forecast: the same element names and the same 20 sectors. What differs is delivery. The NWS pre-renders each sector as a fixed image, so one forecast period is drawn twenty times at twenty fixed extents and none of them pan or zoom. Here a sector is simply a bounding box the map flies to, so one national raster serves all of them — and you can zoom straight past the sector boundaries to your own county.

Because a domain costs nothing but a bounding box, this one goes two levels deeper than theirs: national, region, state, forecast office — 193 domains against 20. Use the breadcrumb to climb, the chips beneath it to drill in, and the arrows on the map to step to the neighbouring domain (shift + arrow keys). Neighbours are real shared borders, so the east arrow over Oklahoma leads to Arkansas rather than to whatever centre happens to be nearest. Smaller domains also label more towns automatically — a single forecast office reaches roughly fifteen thousand places where the national view labels a thousand.

Move the pointer (or tap) anywhere on the map and the corner readout gives the value under it along with the position. There is no extra download for this: every raster is drawn through a fixed palette, so the picture is a reversible encoding of the forecast and the browser simply reads the colour back. It is as precise as the image — within about a degree — and can differ from a city label by a unit, since the label is sampled from the model grid and the readout from the drawn map.

The timeline carries the whole run, not a window into it — every period NDFD publishes for the element you are looking at. That is not one fixed number: temperature and sky cover are hourly for a day and a half, then three-hourly, then six-hourly out to day seven; precipitation amount comes in six-hour buckets and stops at day three; minimum temperature is one value per night. So the axis is rebuilt for each element rather than shared, and the tick strip labels frames rather than clock times — which is why the labels thin out toward the right of a temperature loop and stay even across a QPF one. 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.

Output shape reframes the map rather than cropping it afterwards — 16:9, square, 4:5 or 9:16 vertical — and PNG, MP4 and GIF export follow the canvas, so a vertical loop for a phone comes straight out of the page. Fit keeps the whole domain in view; Fill crops it to the frame about the domain's centre of area, so a vertical Florida frames the peninsula rather than the Gulf.

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