The Air Above

The forecast over the Chesapeake as a solid block of sky you can pick up and turn — every cloud deck drawn at its modeled altitude, winds aloft on their pressure levels, the freezing surface tilting with the air mass, rain columns reaching the ground, and the live radar draped over the map at “now.” Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom, and slide through the next two days.

KANP · 5×5 model grid · ~120 nm across · 40,000 ft tall
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GFS · Open-Meteo
drag to orbit · scroll to zoom · double-click resets
loading the atmosphere…
winds aloft: <12 12–25 25–40 40+ kt

The column over KANP

waiting on the model…

How to read it

  • Cloud decks are the model's cloud-cover fraction at each pressure surface, drawn at that surface's forecast height. The texture is invented; the coverage and the altitude are the model's. Each visible deck is labeled on the left axis (height · millibars).
  • The cyan sheet is the freezing level, drawn point by point across the grid, so you can watch 0 °C tilt as a different air mass leans into the region.
  • Winds are °true, like everywhere on this site. Grid arrows fly downwind and are colored by speed; the barb staff over the field reads the usual way — pennant 50, full barb 10, half 5 kt.
  • Rain: blue columns rise from where the model drops precip to the deck it falls from. At the “now” hour the ground wears the live radar (RainViewer); every other hour it's shaded by the model's precip instead — the caption says which you're seeing.
  • The vertical scale is ×7.5 exaggerated. At true scale this ~120-nm-wide box would be about eighteen times wider than it is tall, and every cloud deck would be a coat of paint.
  • Model: NOAA GFS (HRRR-blended in the near term) via Open-Meteo, hourly, on a 5×5 grid of columns. It's one model's opinion of the sky — sanity-check it against the METAR line and the Skew-T.
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