Alabama 811 | Know What's Below.

Weather Heating Up Once Again

| July 17, 2016 @ 6:41 am

*** No Weather Xtreme Video this morning due to operational weather support for the Sloss Music and Arts Festival ***

Alabama is waking up to fewer clouds than we saw in our sky yesterday morning. With the exit of that weak short wave at 500 millibars, it looks the surface high pressure and the upper ridge nosing into the Southeast US will compliment each other and return Central Alabama to only small chances of thunderstorms generated primarily by the heat of the afternoon. Look for the highs across Central Alabama to be mainly in the lower 90s.

The SPC has a standard slight risk for severe storms across the western Great Lakes states today, and that area moves to the eastern Great Lakes area on Day 2. There is no slight risk area on Day 3, but there are two areas marked as marginal. One of those is in Virginia and North Carolina and the second one is in the Central Plains in parts of Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri.

If you have plans for the beach, you can expect 7 to 9 hours of sun each day. Highs will be in the 87 to 90 range on the immediate coast with low to mid 90s inland There is the chance for a passing storm each day, pretty standard weather for summer along the Northern Gulf Coast. The sea water temperature at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab was a warm 89 degrees. See the complete Gulf Coast 7 Day Planner here.

If you are following the tropics, all is quiet in the Atlantic Basin while we have Hurricane Darby and Tropical Storm Estelle in the Eastern North Pacific. A third area of disturbed weather was located off the Mexican coast. All of these were moving westward away from land.

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The 06Z run of the GFS has become a bit more bullish on the influence of the ridge for the next week. Alabama remains on the eastern periphery of the ridge through the latter part of the week ahead. But by Friday and into next weekend, the ridge builds stronger with the 594 height contour stretching from West Coast to East Coast. This promises to bring our high temperatures well into the 90s with highs running in the middle and upper 90s from Tuesday all the way through into next weekend. The heat along with dew points likely to stay in the lower 70s means we could be dealing with heat indices reaching the 105 degree mark, so we are likely to see the issuance of heat advisories for much of Central Alabama during the middle and latter part of next week.

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One of the problems will be that morning lows will not be falling back much with lows dropping back into the middle and upper 70s. This does not provide much relief from the daytime heat.

Looking out into week 2, the GFS is holding onto the idea of another strong upper low coming across Canada that will help to beat the ridge back over the western states around the 28th of July. The GFS maintains troughiness over the eastern half of the US as we close out July and head into early August. While there are no signs of any air mass changes during week 2, the troughiness over the eastern half of the country will help to hold our heat in check with highs mainly in the lower and middle 90s. Small consolation, but we’ll take what little heat reduction we can get.

I’ll be providing onsite weather support on behalf of the folks running the Sloss Music and Arts Festival at Sloss Furnace today, so not enough time to produce a complete video. James is expected back with the next edition of the Weather Xtreme Video first thing on Monday. Keep the heat in mind as you go about your tasks this week, and use common sense by not overdoing it when working or playing in the great outdoors. Have a wonderful day, and Godspeed.

-Brian-

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Category: Alabama's Weather

About the Author ()

Brian Peters is one of the television meteorologists at ABC3340 in Birmingham and a retired NWS Warning Coordination Meteorologist. He handles the weekend Weather Xtreme Videos and forecast discussion and is the Webmaster for the popular WeatherBrains podcast.

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