Radio: your forecast, read aloud

The same forecast as the home page, written to be heard.

What you will hear, in order

1. Who we are, and the time where you are.
2. Anything official, in the Weather Service's own words. It comes before everything else.
3. The one sentence the home page leads with, for the lens you picked.
4. What it is like right now, said as a reading only if a weather station made it.
5. The rest of the day, what to wear, and the air if it is not good. The full report adds the week, the sun and the sky.
6. One joke, and then we are out.

The show

The longest length is a small variety hour built around the same weather. A host who takes the time. A disc jockey who has been on the air since 1974, is delighted by everything, and cannot quite be understood. A sponsor, who is a sweet older woman with no idea how she sounds, and who reads one real piece from The Lumber Outlet Group's shop, once, at the price on the shop's page. A joke desk with an intern. A short story, made up, with a bed of rain or crickets under the weather when there is some.

The weather in it is read exactly as everywhere else on this site. The comedy sits around it, never inside it. Every reference the disc jockey makes is true, which is the joke. Every voice is a machine, every character is made up, and the show says so out loud at the end. The music and the sounds are AI-made, once, and kept.

You can leave the sponsor out. The box in the player does it, and so does the shop switch on the home page.

When there is a warning

A warning the Weather Service marks as immediate, like a tornado warning, is the whole broadcast: the alert, what to do, and the alert again. There is no outfit, no joke and no sign-off. Under any other warning the report carries on, with no joke. In every case with a warning there is no show: no music, no second voice, no sponsor, no story. You get the plain report, and the alert comes first.

We say "no official alerts" only when we checked. If we could not check, we say so, and that it is not the same as none. Outside the United States we have no alerts to read, so a short report says nothing about them and a longer one says why.

How it works

The report is written on our server from the same forecast, and the same sentences, as the home page. Your browser does the talking, in whatever voices it has, and the show gives each character a different one. When the studio voices are switched on, the page offers them, says they are AI voices, and says whose; a warning is always read by your browser at once. Nothing is recorded. The place you pick goes to our server to get the forecast, as it does on the home page, and is not kept.

If the weather sources are not answering and we only have old data, the report says how old before it says anything else. The weather is from the National Weather Service and Open-Meteo, and the air quality is from AirNow. The methodology page says how each sentence is made.

A forecast is a forecast. For a warning, follow the Weather Service and your local officials.