Eli5 How do weather forecasts differentiate whether it will remain cloudy or the clouds will lead to rain?

Question

How do we know that it will remain cloudy but won’t rain? Or if the clouds will surmount to any precipitation?

In: 121

Answer 1

Different cloud types have different chances to rain. We also know how each of those cloud types form and so based on lots of weather data like humidity, temperature and pressure we can make good guesses about wheter or not a rain type cloud will form.

These days it’s usually a computer crunching away but we have more than one model like GFS or NAM and the weatherperson has to choose based on local history and other factors which model or combination of models they are going use to make their prediction.