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One Nice Day Before Rainy Weather

| November 27, 2016 @ 7:09 am

Another rivalry Saturday has come and gone and I hope your team was successful. I was able to catch the FSU/Florida game last night, and I was glad to see the Seminoles show up for the whole came and come out on top!

Central Alabama starting out a bit chilly this morning with readings mainly in the 20s. Black Creek in Etwowah County reported 17 degrees this morning and Noccalula Falls reported 22 degrees. The sky will gradually become cloudy as the system to our west begins to inch closer promising a round of wet weather – anyone know what that is? – for the latter part of Monday through Wednesday. But for today, some filtering cirrus clouds will see temperatures climb into the 60s for the area.

Beach weather looks dry through Monday with no threat of rain and partly cloudy days. Conditions will also be a bit windy. Highs will be around 70° this weekend, while lows will be in the upper 40s and lower 50s from Gulf Shores to Panama City Beach. See the complete Gulf Coast 7 Day Planner here.

The tropics are quiet in both regions as the 2016 tropical cyclone season winds slowly to a close. SPC has a couple of marginal risks for severe storms today, Day 1, in parts of Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas. Day 2, Monday, there is an enhanced risk for severe storms over North and Central Louisiana with a marginal risk clipping the western counties of Alabama. Day 3, Tuesday, all of Alabama is in a marginal risk with a slight risk for the southwestern counties.

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The HPC guys are projecting 3 to 5 inches of rainfall through next Friday morning for much of the northern third of Alabama. This coincides well with the area of Extreme Drought according to the Drought Monitor. Much of the rest of the state will see amounts of 1.75″ to 3′. For Central Alabama using the Birmingham climatological data, we have only seen 11 days this year with rainfall of 1.00″ or more. The last time we recorded a 24-hour rainfall of more than an inch was July 30th, nearly 4 months ago!

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We start out today with a surface high pressure system located over the Carolinas. This slips eastward Monday allowing our surface flow to fully come around to the south. Aloft, a deep trough that has dug into West Texas will fly northeastward to the eastern Great Lakes by Tuesday. This generates a surface low over the North Central US with a cold front trailing into the Lower Mississippi River Valley Monday that drags into the Southeast US on Tuesday. This will provide the conditions for a round of severe storms in the Lower Mississippi River Valley as indicated by SPC which is likely to include all modes of severe weather including isolated tornadoes.

Both the GFS and the ECMWF forecast the front to move east of Alabama by Tuesday afternoon. I’m concerned that the frontal boundary is being pushed too far east because the upper ridge is holding very strong over South Florida which keeps a strong, wet southwesterly flow across all of the southern US from Texas to the Carolinas. But we’ll probably see a lull in precipitation Tuesday afternoon and evening.

But a second trough drops into the Southwest US on Tuesday and ejects into the Mississippi River Valley on Wednesday. This will bring another round of thunderstorms to the Southeast US on Wednesday with the potential for additional severe storms over a fairly sizable chunk of the Southeast US. Conditions for severe storms are not quite as clear cut with the second round of storms depending in part on how much the atmosphere can recover between round 1 and round 2. Model differences also make it difficult to be specific. So this will be a stay tuned situation. But as noted earlier in the discussion, we will be seeing our first significant rain event in a number of months which is expected to have an influence on moderating the drought situation.

The latter half of the week, from Thursday into Saturday, the upper flow pattern will see ridging over the eastern half of the country, so we should be dry and somewhat cool with highs in the 50s, a little below our seasonal values.

While the ridge is forecast to hold, a strong trough will come across the northern US on Sunday with a cut off upper low over northern Mexico. This is edging into voodoo country, but the GFS is painting another round of rainy/stormy conditions for the Gulf Coast Sunday. Both the GFS and the ECMWF have this system, so confidence is at least moderate in seeing some more rain.

Looking into week two or voodoo country, the GFS brings that closed low out of northern Mexico on Tuesday, December 6. After that system moves by, the GFS is rather bullish on the upper ridge becoming a major factor in the upper air pattern keeping the traveling storm system to our west and north.

Special thanks to Bill Murray for filling in for me yesterday as I traveled back to Birmingham from a family reunion in Tallahassee, FL. I wanted to stay for the game, but tickets were sold out, so I got back to Helena in time to watch it on television. James Spann will be back in the saddle once again with the next edition of the Weather Xtreme Video first thing Monday morning. Have a great 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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