Showers For West Alabama

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Wow… at this hour we have some light rain falling over far West Alabama; nice to see something on the radar for a change. We have a few raindrops over Sumter and Choctaw Counties; that is in response to the old upper level feature that still shows up around the Ark-La-Tex region. We will continue to mention the chance of a few showers over the western side of the state today, especially along and west of U.S. 43. For the rest of Alabama, the weather remains warm, hazy, and smoky with highs in the 80s.

TROPICAL ACTION? The 00Z GFS develops a tropical storm near the northern tip of Yucatan on Friday, and moves it up toward Apalachee Bay over the weekend. This run is an outlier; the 06Z run (just coming in as I write this) shows the system moving more toward the southern part of the Florida peninsula, and that is a preferred solution since it matches previous runs well. This will bring some very beneficial rain to South Florida by Saturday and Sunday, but it also means rough surf and riptides as far north as the Alabama Gulf coast. We note that John Oldshue reported dangerous surf down there during the Memorial Day weekend; that will continue for the next three to four days.

OUR WEEKEND: As Brian Peters astutely points out in his post yesterday afternoon, the GFS most likely isn’t handling the old upper feature to the west of here very well. What’s left of that thing will be hanging around here over the weekend, so if nothing else we will have a few widely scattered showers and thunderstorms on Saturday and Sunday, and that is what we have in our forecast. The showers will be more numerous if:

*The tropical system in the Gulf moves toward Panama City instead of Fort Myers (which I think is very unlikely)
*The strong upper trough over the Midwest digs farther to the south (possible, but not likely)
*The old upper wave now around Shreveport and Texarkana is more potent that shown on the GFS (again, possible, but unlikely)

VOODOO LAND: We will mention the standard chance of “widely scattered afternoon showers and thunderstorms” for much of next week as there will be a good supply of low level moisture over the Deep South. Still, nothing showing up that would bring us a big rain event on a widespread basis. Toward mid-month, the GFS is hinting that the hottest weather will be over the Southwest U.S.

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WEATHER BRAINS: Don’t forget you can listen to our weekly 30 minute netcast anytime on the web, or on iTunes. This is the show all about weather hosted by David Black and featuring many familiar voices, including our meteorologists here at ABC 33/40. Another very interesting show this week.

I will have the next Weather Xtreme video posted by 3:30 this afternoon… we are packing up today getting ready to head south to the Alabama Gulf Coast tomorrow. If by chance you are about to do the same thing, be sure and check out my “Spann’s Best Way To The Bama Beaches” article I posted a week or so here!

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