ABOUT THIS SITE

Forecast American covers 52 countries and territories across North America, Central America, South America and the Caribbean, with 459 places reading 169 aerodrome stations.

Three countries in the hemisphere are not covered here, because they have sites of their own on this network: Canada at forecastcanada.com, the United States at forecasteagle.com, and Mexico at forecastmexico.com. Each of those carries more model output than a country card can hold — Mexico's is four global models drawn on one identical frame, because it is the one country of the three with no national high-resolution model published as open data.

Every reading on this site is a METAR. A METAR is the routine observation an aerodrome files, usually hourly, in a format fixed by ICAO Annex 3. It carries temperature, dewpoint, wind, visibility, cloud and pressure. The reports move on the WMO Global Telecommunication System and NOAA redistributes the global set, through aviationweather.gov and the NWS bulk feed at tgftp.nws.noaa.gov.

Why METAR and not a forecast API. This hemisphere has some thirty national meteorological services, no shared interface between them, and in several cases no public feed at all. The free forecast aggregators that paper over that gap are non-commercial licences and this site could not use them. METAR is the one real-time network that covers Nuuk, Ushuaia and Kralendijk on the same terms — and as a work of the United States government, NOAA's redistribution of it is in the public domain, with no key, no licence and no restriction on use.

The site does not call NOAA from your browser. A cron job fetches the stations this site uses every few minutes and writes one JSON file; your browser reads that file. So there is one request per page, it is first-party, and NOAA sees one ingest rather than one hit per reader.

A METAR is the airport, not the town. That is the single most important caveat on this site and it is why every place here shows the station it reads, how far away it is, and how high it is. Most are close enough not to matter. Some are not, and those are the interesting ones: El Alto is the observation for La Paz and sits about 400 m above the city; Sucre's nearest reporting station is some 60 km off; several places in Amazonia and Patagonia are reading the only aerodrome within a hundred kilometres.

A station that has not filed is shown as blank, not as a guess. Coverage in this hemisphere is genuinely uneven — Suriname has no station filing on the international circuit at the moment, and Venezuela's network is a fraction of what it was. The pages show that as it is.

Places with no station within 120 km carry no reading at all. Beyond that distance an observation stops describing the same weather, and the honest answer is to say nothing.

It is not a warning service, and it is not an official source. Fifty-two countries and territories means fifty-two warning authorities, in four languages. Every country page links to the one that covers it. During a tropical cyclone, the advisory everything else in this basin follows comes from the National Hurricane Center in Miami, which is the WMO regional specialised centre for the North Atlantic and the eastern North Pacific.

The country pages carry observations, not forecasts. Those are two different things and this site keeps them apart on purpose. What a METAR tells you is what the air is doing at an aerodrome right now; what a model tells you is what it might do next, and the two deserve different pages and different caveats. The forecasts are in the model explorer — three centres' global models, side by side, over the whole hemisphere — and, for one continent, in the South America maps.

It is an independent project. Not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to NOAA, the National Weather Service, or any national meteorological service named on it.

The models are not rendered here. The explorer reads frames published by three sibling sites — Environment Canada's GEM from forecastcanada.com, NOAA's GFS from forecasteagle.com and ECMWF HRES from forecasteuro.com — all of them global rasters in Web Mercator. This site runs no model ingest and stores no model imagery.

South America gets two pages of its own, and both are built on ECMWF HRES at 0.1°. That is a claim about this continent rather than a preference: south of Mexico there is no operational high-resolution national model to fall back on, so the global guidance is the forecast, and among the globals ECMWF runs at the finest grid, publishes the most fields and reaches the furthest. Brazil's CPTEC runs its own global model, BAM; it is coarser than all three of these and publishes nothing this site could read, which is why it is not on the page. GEM and GFS remain one click away on both.

The map is a free camera with 41 framings of the continent. The locked chart viewer beside it is the other instrument: the camera moves only when a region button is pressed, the run is decoded up front, and every field, hour and run lands in the same rectangle to the pixel — so a change on screen is a change in the weather rather than a change in the camera. Locked is not read-only; hovering still reads the value out of the drawn pixel.

Boundaries and places are Natural Earth 1:10m — the map units file rather than the countries file, because that is the one that breaks French Guiana, Guadeloupe and Martinique out of France. Public domain.

The map is Lambert azimuthal equal-area centred on 15°N 88°W. Country pages use a cosine-corrected equirectangular fit to each country's own bounding box, so the country fills its frame at an honest shape.

Station positions are the NWS station database (nsd_cccc.txt), with positions for stations it does not list — Lima and Quito among them — taken from aviationweather.gov.

Flags are flag-icons. The French overseas departments and the Caribbean Netherlands officially fly their sovereign's flag, so that is what their cards carry; each says whose department it is directly underneath.

Type is Overpass, the open cut of FHWA Highway Gothic, self-hosted. The design is the U.S. MUTCD guide-sign system this whole network uses — green for guide, blue for services, brown for the land, red for warning — with the panel here in service blue, because Forecast Eagle already has the green and Forecast Canada already has the red.