Warmer Days

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Our Skywatcher in Black Creek, Vic Bell, reported his 36th day with a low temperature below freezing. Hopefully, he’ll be ending this streak tomorrow or Tuesday morning as we see a nice warmup. But the overall weather pattern remains busy, just well to our north.

Look for plenty of sunshine once again today with a few passing clouds. Highs got close to 50 yesterday in most spots and we should see highs edge into the lower 60s for much of Central Alabama today – and that should feel very nice. Those jonquils of mine that have sprung up in the last week could go bonkers and bloom this week.

While the overall weather pattern remains very active, the parade of disturbances is well to our north. That means that the surface lows and upper disturbances will be traveling along the US-Canadian border, so front will only drag down into our area as a nearly zonal flow across the southern US will take the steam out of the fronts so that they drag into the area without much significant change in our weather. It does mean that we’ll be somewhat unsettled with small chances for patchy rain and showers off and on. So it may be hard to specify the best time for rain chances well in advance.

A strong disturbance is forecast to drop into the western US on Friday and kick out a bit further south on Saturday. This is likely to produce a good surface low in the Central US that will move northeast across the Great Lakes dragging a much more potent front into and through the Southeast US. The GFS and the ECMWF are in close agreement but with minor differences on the amount of rain and the speed with which is comes through. The GFS is a bit faster than the ECMWF, but even with the timing differences, it looks like the forecast of a wet weekend next weekend will be a pretty good one.

With the zonal flow across the southern US and the parade of disturbances to our north, temperatures across the Southeast US should be fairly nice with lows coming up into the 40s and 50s and highs climbing into the 60s and lower 70s each day of the week ahead.

And right now there does not seem to be any solid signs of any kind of severe weather threat.

Looking into Week 2, or voodoo country, the GFS maintains the idea of a strong trough coming across the Mississippi River Valley around the 26th and 27th of February which could be stormy and bring another substantial shot of cold weather. But by the 3rd of March, the eastern US comes under a swelling ridge that would bring about significant warming to the eastern half of the country while the western US plunges into cold. But we’re in voodoo where the trends are what we look for.

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Very excited to have a Storm Alert Xtreme this Spring. Mark your calendars for March 5th at 6:30 pm at the Pelham Civic Center. The event will focus on basic storm spotter training. So if you have an interest in becoming a trained spotter or if you have been trained before but could use a refresher, please plan to attend our first Spring spotter training session. James Spann will be back first thing Monday morning with the next edition of the Weather Xtreme Video. Enjoy the warmth and Godspeed.

-Brian-

Category: Alabama's Weather