With the growing popularity of the Internet over the years, Area Forecast Discussions (AFD), written by forecasters in the National Weather Service, are accessible to a much larger number of people than in years past, when the discussion was essentially an internal coordination device. It is because the AFD has become such a public product that forecasters have been discouraged from using abbreviations and contractions whenever possible. Nevertheless, certain common contractions are still used. These contractions frequently refer to meteorological parameters unfamiliar to the general public. If you are a reader of our AFDs, you may be interested in making some sense out of the alphabet soup. On this page, you will find out what many of those obscure contractions stand for. If you can't find the contraction you are looking for on this page, a more exhaustive list is available.
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