Every prediction market runs on information, and in almost all of them somebody has better information than you do. On a weather market, nobody has a private line to the data that settles it. The number that settles a Kalshi temperature contract comes from the National Weather Service, a federal agency that publishes its observations for free to everyone at the same moment. There is no injury report you are not allowed to see, no earnings whisper, no leak. The data that decides whether you win or lose is a public document, and you can read the exact same one the settlement uses.
This is the whole reason the article exists, and it is a genuinely unusual property for a market to have. Below I will show you what that document is (it is called a CLI report), how to read the two lines on it that actually settle contracts, and why "no insider edge" changes how a careful newcomer should think about these markets compared with sports betting or election trading.
The Quick Answer
Kalshi weather contracts settle on the official daily climate report the National Weather Service publishes for one named station, a plain-text product known as the CLI report. It is free, public, and identical for every trader, which is why weather is one of the few markets where a careful newcomer is not starting a step behind on information. What follows is what a CLI report contains, how to read the lines that matter, and why that public-data structure is so rare.
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What A CLI Report Actually Is
CLI is the product code the National Weather Service uses for its Daily Climate Report. Each local Weather Forecast Office issues one for the stations it covers, so a New York report carries a code like CLINYC and a Los Angeles one carries CLILAX. It is not a forecast and not a phone-app estimate. Think of it as the official record of what a specific weather station actually observed over a calendar day: the high temperature and when it occurred, the low and when it occurred, precipitation, snowfall, and how each of those compares with the long-term normal and the record.
Official-record status is exactly why the contracts point at it. As we cover in how prediction market contracts work, a binary event derivative needs an outcome that is not open to argument, and "the temperature in the city" is very much open to argument, because a metro area has dozens of thermometers that disagree every day. The CLI report resolves that by naming one station and one official number. Which station is written into each market's rules, and it is not always the airport you would guess: Houston markets settle on Hobby, not Bush Intercontinental, a trap we break down in the settlement station is not the city.
Tropical systems settle off different paperwork — our Kalshi hurricane markets breakdown explains the NHC side.
How To Read A CLI Report
A CLI report looks intimidating because it is dense monospaced text, but for trading purposes only a few lines matter. Here is the shape of the temperature block, with illustrative numbers to show the layout rather than any real day:
| CLI Line | What it reports | Which market it settles |
|---|---|---|
| MAXIMUM | 94 at 3:51 PM | The afternoon-high contracts |
| MINIMUM | 71 at 5:18 AM | The overnight-low contracts |
| PRECIPITATION | 0.00 | The rain contracts |
The line that settles most of the action is the first one. MAXIMUM is the single highest temperature the station officially logged all day, and the band on the ladder that contains that number pays a dollar while every other band pays zero. Notice the time stamp next to it: 3:51 PM. That tells you the high was set in mid-afternoon, which is normal, and it is why a morning temperature tells you so little about where a daily high will land. There is a lot of day left when the sun is still climbing, and how much is left to run depends on climate: humid cities barely move off their morning number while dry ones swing hard. The MINIMUM line works in the opposite direction, and because overnight lows and afternoon highs are set at opposite ends of the day, they behave like two different games even inside the same city.
Reading that block is really the skill behind reading a temperature band ladder: the ladder is a probability distribution over where the MAXIMUM line will print, and the CLI report is the answer key that arrives at the end of the day.
Make sure the CLI you are reading comes from the contract's named station — the settlement station trap shows what happens when it does not.
The Data Is Public, Free, And The Same For Everyone
The National Weather Service is taxpayer funded, and its products are published in the public domain. You do not need a subscription, a data vendor, or a broker relationship to see a CLI report. The same is true of the public forecasts feeding it: the National Weather Service's own model guidance, the forecast discussion your local office writes, and the observations updating through the day are all posted openly at weather.gov. No one is working from a secret settlement feed, and every participant in a Kalshi weather market can price off the same public picture.
This removes the usual reason a newcomer loses. In most markets, price already reflects information you were never going to have, so the forecast is not the price, and the gap between them is where more informed money has already moved. The reason prediction markets are as accurate as they are is that they aggregate whatever traders know, and in weather what traders know is a shared, free document. You are not behind on inputs. You can read exactly what settles the contract.
Why "No Insider Edge" Is Unusual
Set weather next to the other things people trade on Kalshi and the contrast is sharp. A sports contract lives with injury reports, beat-writer leaks, and lineup news that hits some people before others. An election contract moves on internal polling and donor chatter that never becomes fully public. An economic contract can lurch on a data release that a few desks model better than anyone else. In each of those, part of the price is information asymmetry, and a casual trader is structurally a step behind.
Weather has none of that. No locker room, no embargoed number, no source. The observation that settles the contract is a public reading from a public instrument, published by an agency whose entire job is to tell everyone at once. That does not make weather easy, and it does not hand you an edge. It only means the edge, if one exists, has to come from judgment about publicly available information rather than from access to private information. For a careful newcomer, that is the friendliest starting structure in the building.
What Public Data Does Not Remove: The Risk Shape
Equal information is not the same as equal safety, and this is the part that costs people the most, so it belongs on every page in this series. A common way to trade these markets is to sell an unlikely band, a temperature outcome the ladder prices near the tails. You collect a small premium and you risk most of a dollar. Roughly speaking, one loss erases the premiums from about 23 wins. That arithmetic, not the hit rate, is why position sizing is the entire game, and it is why a red day that wipes out a green stretch is the shape of the strategy working as designed, not a malfunction. It is the same asymmetry we walk through in when you sell a long shot, one loss costs many wins, and reading the public data perfectly does not change the payoff math one cent. The shared data cuts the other way too: because one air mass can cover many cities at once, positions in fifteen different cities are not fifteen independent bets, so the same public picture that levels the field can move your whole book the same direction on the same afternoon.
I will be plain about our own stake in this: Stokastic trades these Kalshi weather markets and holds positions in them, and where a settled position gets described in this series, we were the seller. We do not publish a running record on a permanent page like this one, because any figure printed here would freeze the moment it posted while the real log kept moving. The honest shape is that the log is short, it currently sits in the red, and it is far too small to confirm an edge or to rule one out. Current figures live on our Kalshi weather markets hub, which is rebuilt through the day, and nothing on this page is a pick.
The Rare Market Where Your Homework Is The Whole Edge
The forward promise I made at the top was that "no insider edge" would change how you think, and here is the payoff. Because the settling data is a free public document, the entire question on a weather market is how well you read what everyone can already see. But public data still leaves one job it cannot do for you, which is getting into a position without handing the edge back. In a market where the whole question is worth a few cents, crossing the spread for an instant fill can cost more than the view is worth, so resting an order and waiting for it is a structural choice, not a personality trait. The reading is free; the discipline to act on it cheaply is where the work actually lives, and no public document does that part for you.
If you want to practice pricing public information as probability before you ever open a CLI report, games are a natural training ground, since the same discipline runs through both. Reading a moneyline as an implied probability, and then reading the Kalshi price the same way, is one skill wearing two outfits, and Kalshi's fee schedule matters to a thin weather edge the same way vig matters to a thin sports one. Our free expert picks are a no-cost place to watch probability-first thinking applied to real games while you get comfortable with the idea. And if you are still deciding whether a weather contract is for you, can you bet on the weather starts one step before this one.
To put that homework to work, start with our guide to betting on weather at Kalshi.
FAQ: The Data Behind Kalshi Weather Markets
What data settles a Kalshi weather market? The official daily climate report, or CLI report, that the National Weather Service publishes for the specific station named in the market's rules. The band containing that station's official high or low settles at a dollar; every other band settles at zero.
What is a CLI report? It is the National Weather Service's Daily Climate Report for a station, a public plain-text product listing the day's observed maximum and minimum temperature (with times), precipitation, and comparisons to normals and records. Each report carries a station code, such as CLINYC for New York.
Is the settlement data really free? Yes. The National Weather Service is a public agency and its forecasts and climate reports are published in the public domain at weather.gov, available to every trader at the same time.
Does anyone have inside information on the weather? No. There is no injury report, embargoed number, or private source. Every participant reads the same publicly funded forecast and the same official settlement report, which is unusual among prediction markets.
Disclosure and fine print. Stokastic trades Kalshi weather markets and holds positions in them; where a settled position is described in this series, we were the seller. We have no affiliate or commercial relationship with Kalshi and earn nothing from sending you there. Kalshi weather contracts are CFTC-regulated event derivatives traded on a designated contract market, not sportsbook wagers, and a position can lose its full value. 18+, available where Kalshi operates; the risk of loss is real and, on the side we trade, individually large. This series is an open research log of a strategy we have not proven. Nothing here is trading advice, and nothing on this page is a pick or a recommendation.
