Weather Forecast Maps

With a little knowledge of weather forecast maps you can tell, at a glance, what the weather is going to be like in any given place. To start off with, let’s take a look at high and low pressure systems. High pressure (H) indicates an area where it’s fine and sunny weather with little or no cloud. It can often bring sea and coastal fog in Summer and cloud and fog in Winter.

Low pressure (L) areas are unsettled, which usually means rain and high winds. The lines you see circling high or low pressure areas on weather maps are called “isobars”. These are lines of equal pressure that circle areas of high and low pressure. The closer those lines are to each other, the stronger the winds.

Weather forecast maps used to show three categories of front that are usually associated with areas of low pressure:

Warm Fronts (symbolized by red half-circles along a line the represents the front) show warmer air moving in which usually indicates rain.
Cold Fronts (symbolized by blue triangles along a line that represents the front) show colder air is moving in and, again, this usually means rain or showers
Occluded Fronts (symbolized by alternating red semi-circles and blue triangles along a line that represented the front) are a mixture of the two and (yet again) usually indicate rainfall.

These types of High/Low pressure maps featuring isobars are surprisingly hard to find online these days and most maps now use simple symbols to show what the weather will be like (sun, cloud and rain icons). The maps below show forecasts where it will be sunny, cloudy or raining.

Note: If your part of the world doesn’t appear on any of the maps below, click on any of the maps to see options for your region on the detailed page that will appear.

Weather Forecast Maps