Weather Question: forecasting clouds

I know you mentioned the NOAA site, However, I find the 7-day forecast at

http://www.hpc.ncep.noaa.gov/medr/medr.shtml

To be pretty useful when I'm trying to look a bit further into the future.
You get the standard forecast weather chart - its up to you and your
knowledge of the area to work out what that will mean for flying. As pilots
we get quite a lot of weather training and there is a real incentive to get
familiar with these charts and try to interpret then correctly. For example,
a few days in advance of a XC flight I start looking at the charts for the
day of flight. I try and estimate what the weather will be like and then
each day reassess how I think its going to turn out. Finally, I either get
to fly or not depending on what actually happens. After you do this a few
times you start to get better at knowing what a particular weather pattern
on the chart will translate into as actual weather in you home area.

Having said that, however, I tend to flight plan to fly IFR anyway (use
airways with transitions to IAF for IAP). So I'm usually really interested
in where the freezing level is likely to be and if there is any risk of
embedded thunderstorms. I'm only interested in ceilings if they are likely
below minimums when I want to land.

-Brenor

"Jonathan" wrote in message
news:cPand.115563$R05.55665@attbi_s53...
I've been wondering about this for a while now, and am sure someone here
will know...

How can I find/figure out what the forecast cloud bases will be 3 or 4
days out? I've looked on ADDS, AOPA's weather, NOAA.gov, etc but not
found anything.

In other words, if I'm going flying in a few days, And I go to
weather.com and see 'mostly cloudy' in the forecast, how do I know if
that's "2000' better-file-an-ifr-flight-plan Cloudy" or "10,000'
VFR-is-no-problem" cloudy?

I've tried looking at forecast temperatures and dewpoints, and using lapse
rate calculate cloud bases, but that hasn't worked out.

Are there any sites which give this info? or other info I could use to
figure this out?

TIA for your help

-Jonathan