Weather today and tomorrow: Finding your weather

A field guide to the forecast

Weather today, weather tomorrow, and how to read both

MyWeatherToday is a free weather forecast for any city, town or point on the map. Open it and it works out roughly where you are, then shows the weather today: the temperature this minute, what it feels like, wind, humidity, UV, air quality and whether rain is due in the next three hours. The same place carries through to an hourly forecast, a 14-day outlook, a live weather radar map and the times of sunrise and sunset.

Most people check the weather with three questions in mind, usually in this order. What is the weather today? What’s the weather tomorrow? And does the weekend hold up? Those three answers come with very different levels of certainty. This guide explains what each number on the page means, how far ahead you can lean on it, and how to read the radar when the sky starts to look heavy.

What is the weather today, really?

The large number at the top is the air temperature two metres above the ground, the height every official weather station measures at. It is often not the number your body notices, which is why the line underneath gives the feels-like temperature. That figure folds in wind and humidity. On a 30°F (−1°C) morning with a 20 mph wind, exposed skin loses heat as if it were about 17°F (−8°C). On a 90°F (32°C) afternoon with sticky air, the heat index can pass 100°F (38°C).

The Right now panel adds the details that change your plans:

• Wind and gusts. Sustained wind tells you how a walk will feel. Gusts tell you whether to tie down the patio umbrella. Gusts above about 40 mph (65 km/h) can snap twigs and small branches.
• Humidity and dew point. Relative humidity rises every night as the air cools, so 90% at dawn means little on its own. The dew point is the better comfort gauge: below 55°F (13°C) feels dry, 60 to 65°F (16 to 18°C) starts to feel sticky, and above 70°F (21°C) is properly muggy.
• UV index. At 3 and above, sunscreen is worth it. At 8 and above, fair skin can burn in well under half an hour, even when it feels cool.
• Air quality. We show the US AQI. 0 to 50 is good, 51 to 100 moderate, 101 to 150 unhealthy for sensitive groups such as people with asthma, and above 150 unhealthy for everyone. Wildfire smoke can push it there far from any fire.

Below that, a small bar chart shows rain for the next three hours in fifteen-minute steps. For “should I leave now or in half an hour?” it beats a daily forecast every time.

What’s the weather tomorrow?

After the current hour, the next-day forecast is the most dependable thing a weather model produces. Tomorrow’s high and low are usually within two or three degrees Fahrenheit of what actually happens, and the timing of a cold front or a band of rain is generally right to within a few hours. You will find the weather tomorrow in two places. The 14-day forecast gives the high, low, rain chance and wind for the whole day, and you can open the row for sunrise, rain totals and gusts. The hourly forecast shows tomorrow hour by hour, with temperature, feels like, rain, wind, humidity and UV on separate tabs.

Use the hourly view whenever timing matters. A daily rain icon can mean a twenty-minute shower at 5 a.m. or a soaking that starts at lunchtime and lasts until dinner. If you are planning a commute, a run, a barbecue or a flight, tomorrow’s hourly line is the thing to check the night before.

What a “40% chance of rain” actually means

The percentage is the probability that at least a measurable amount of rain, about 0.01 inch or 0.2 mm, falls at your location during that hour or day. It is not the share of the day it will rain, and it is not the share of the city that gets wet. A 40% chance on a summer afternoon usually means scattered thunderstorms: some streets get a downpour and others stay dry.

Read the chance together with the amount. An 80% chance of 0.5 mm is drizzle you can ignore with a hood. A 40% chance of 20 mm is a storm you would not want to be caught cycling in. As a rough guide, under 20% you can forget it, 30 to 50% means pack a jacket if you will be out for a while, and from 60% upwards it is worth planning around.

The 10-day and 14-day weather forecast, with honest limits

Plenty of sites will show you the weather 10 days out, or the weather 14 days ahead, and draw every one of those days with the same crisp sun or cloud. The atmosphere doesn’t work that way. Small errors in today’s starting measurements grow as a model runs forward, and somewhere around a week out they start to swamp the detail. NOAA’s own rule of thumb is that a five-day forecast is right about 90% of the time, a seven-day forecast about 80%, and a ten-day forecast only about half the time.

That doesn’t make the long range useless. It means you read each stretch for a different thing:

• Days 1 to 3: trust the detail. Highs, lows, the hour rain starts, wind shifts.
• Days 4 to 7: trust the pattern. A warm spell, a cold front around Thursday, a wet weekend. Exact temperatures may move a few degrees as the day gets closer.
• Days 8 to 14: trust the trend only. Warmer or cooler than now, mostly dry or unsettled. Use it to decide whether a trip needs a heavier coat, not to pick the hour of a picnic.

The best way to use a 14-day outlook is to watch it change. If a storm keeps showing up on the same day ten days out for three or four mornings running, the models agree and it is worth taking seriously. If it jumps around from one day to the next, it is noise. The days page lets you switch between a 7-day weather forecast and the full 14 days, so you can keep the dependable week in view and treat the second week as a sketch.

Live weather radar: see rain before it reaches you

A forecast tells you what is likely. Weather radar shows what is falling right now. Radar dishes send out short pulses of microwave energy and listen for the echo bouncing off raindrops, snowflakes and hail. The stronger the echo, the heavier the precipitation. On our weather radar map, light green is light rain, yellow and orange are heavy showers, and red or purple usually means torrential rain or hail inside a thunderstorm. In the United States the source is the NEXRAD Doppler radar network run by the National Weather Service. Elsewhere it is each country’s national radars, combined into one map.

To check the weather radar near me, open the map, which centres on your place, and press play. The animation runs through the last couple of hours of scans, and that motion is where radar earns its keep. Note which way the shower is drifting and how far it travels in an hour of frames, and you can estimate its arrival better than any icon. A band of rain 30 miles west of you moving at 30 mph is about an hour out.

Radar has blind spots worth knowing. The beam travels in a straight line while the Earth curves away underneath it, so far from a radar site it overshoots low drizzle and light snow. Snow also reflects less energy than rain, so a heavy snowfall can look weaker on radar than it is out the window. Sometimes radar shows rain that never reaches the ground because it evaporates on the way down, which meteorologists call virga. And radar stops at the coast. That is why the map also has a rain forecast layer from the weather models, along with temperature, animated wind, cloud, pressure, humidity and air quality, running 48 hours ahead. Use live weather radar for the next hour or two, and the model layers for this evening and tomorrow.

Texas, Ohio and Michigan weather radar

Regional patterns make a local weather radar far more useful once you know what to look for.

Texas weather radar: in spring, storms often fire in the afternoon along the dryline, the boundary between dry desert air to the west and humid Gulf air to the east. They then roll east towards Dallas–Fort Worth, Austin and San Antonio in the evening. A single cell that suddenly turns red and purple and develops a hook shape on its southwest flank is the classic tornado signature. Along the coast in summer and early autumn, watch the Gulf for tropical moisture feeding in from the south.

Michigan weather radar and Ohio weather radar: from late autumn into winter, the Great Lakes run the show. When cold air blows across relatively warm lake water it picks up moisture and dumps it as lake-effect snow in narrow, intense bands. On radar these look like thin streaks that barely move. West Michigan, around Grand Rapids, Muskegon and Holland, catches bands off Lake Michigan. Northeast Ohio’s snowbelt, east of Cleveland, gets them off Lake Erie. One town can pick up a foot of snow while the next one over sees flurries, so the radar is often more useful than the forecast. In summer, both states get fast-moving lines of thunderstorms sweeping in from the west, sometimes with damaging straight-line winds.

Weather in New York, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Austin and Denver

Every city has habits that the raw numbers don’t explain. Here is what to watch for in some of the most-searched places. Each link opens the live forecast or radar for that city.

NYC weather

New York’s official readings come from Central Park, and the city’s weather is shaped by the Atlantic on one side and the continent on the other. In winter, the big question during a nor’easter is where the rain–snow line sets up. It often runs right across the metro area, so Manhattan gets slush while the northern suburbs pick up half a foot. If the hourly temperature for the city sits between 32 and 35°F during a storm, expect the snow forecast to be the least certain part of it. In summer, the weather in New York turns humid, with heat indexes above 100°F on the worst days and late-afternoon thunderstorms drifting in from New Jersey. A sea breeze can keep Brooklyn and Queens several degrees cooler than the Bronx. For the weather NYC today, check the 15-minute rain bars before heading for the subway.

Weather NYC todayHourlyWeather New York, 14 daysNYC radar

Chicago weather and radar

Lake Michigan is the thing to understand about Chicago weather. In spring and early summer, an onshore breeze can leave the lakefront 15 to 20°F cooler than O’Hare on the same afternoon, which is the origin of the TV forecaster’s “cooler by the lake”. In winter, the same open water and a steady northwest wind create brutal wind chills, and a northeast wind can send lake-effect snow into the city and northwest Indiana. On the Chicago weather radar in summer, watch for clusters of storms forming over Iowa and Wisconsin and riding southeast into the evening.

Chicago weather todayHourly14 daysChicago weather radar

Houston weather and radar

Houston weather is Gulf weather: warm, humid, and capable of extraordinary rainfall. The city is flat, much of its soil is clay that absorbs little water, and its bayous rise fast. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 dropped more than 40 inches of rain on parts of the area. Hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30. On the Houston weather radar, the pattern to fear is “training”, where storm after storm forms over the same spot like carriages on a track. If you see that on the map, stay off underpasses and low roads. The National Weather Service’s advice is short: turn around, don’t drown.

Houston weather todayHourly14 daysHouston weather radar

Dallas weather and radar

Dallas sits at the southern edge of tornado alley, and spring brings supercell thunderstorms with large hail that can damage roofs and cars across Dallas–Fort Worth in minutes. Those storms usually form west of the city in the afternoon and arrive in the evening, so the Dallas weather radar between 4 and 9 p.m. in April and May is worth a look before you park outside. Summers bring long runs of days near or above 100°F, and winters are mild with the occasional damaging ice storm.

Dallas weather todayHourly14 daysDallas weather radar

Austin weather and radar

Austin lies along the Balcones Escarpment, where the Texas Hill Country drops to the coastal plain. Moist Gulf air forced up that slope can wring out huge amounts of rain in a few hours, which is why the region is known as Flash Flood Alley. When the Austin weather radar shows slow-moving storms parked over the hills to the west, creeks and low-water crossings can flood even under clear skies in town. Summers are long and hot, and winter brings “cedar fever” from mountain cedar pollen, which bothers many people from December into February.

Austin weather todayHourly14 daysAustin weather radar

Denver weather

At 5,280 feet, Denver has thin, dry air that heats and cools quickly, so 30-degree swings between afternoon and the next morning are routine. The sun is stronger at altitude too, so the UV index runs higher than the temperature would suggest. Warm, dry chinook winds can push winter afternoons into the 60s, and a cold front with an east “upslope” wind can turn a sunny 70°F day into heavy snow within 24 hours, even in April or May. For Denver weather, the hourly forecast and the wind direction tell you more than the daily icon does.

Denver weather todayHourly14 daysDenver radar

For anywhere else, search any city or town worldwide at the top of the page, and star the places you check often.

A weather channel in a browser tab

A lot of people search for “weather channel” or “the weather channel” when what they want is quick: the local weather forecast, right now, without a video playing first. MyWeatherToday is an independent site and is not affiliated with The Weather Channel or any TV station. It is built for that quick check: everything for one place on one page, no account and no app. If you run a website you can embed the same live forecast for free with the weather widget builder.

What we don’t do is replace official warnings. For tornado, hurricane, flood and winter storm warnings in the United States, your local National Weather Service office and alerts on your phone are the authority. Use this page to understand the weather around those warnings and to plan your day.

Where this weather forecast comes from

The forecast blends output from national weather services, including NOAA in the United States, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, Germany’s DWD, Météo-France and others. For each place it picks the highest-resolution model available, such as NOAA’s HRRR model over the US for the next day or two, then hands off to global models for the longer range. Air quality comes from European atmosphere-monitoring models, and radar from national radar networks around the world. Conditions refresh about every fifteen minutes.

One caveat applies to every weather site: a forecast describes a grid cell a few kilometres wide, not your back garden. Valleys run colder on clear nights, city centres stay warmer after dark, and hills catch more rain. If your spot is consistently a few degrees off the forecast, that’s your microclimate, and it’s worth learning.

Common questions

More weather questions, from reading the radar to the monsoon in India