Alabama 811 | Know What's Below.

Ingredients For Strong/Severe Weather Are In Place… Now We Wait

| March 25, 2019 @ 1:37 pm

More sunshine continues to warm the atmosphere over North/Central Alabama as we have now made it into the 1 o’clock hour. Now is the time we sit back and wait for storms to initiate over the area.

No change has been made to the Slight and Marginal Risk areas for the rest of today and the main window for strong to severe storm is now until 9:00 pm tonight.

Radar is quiet as of 1:20 pm with the only returns showing up are over the extreme southeastern parts of the area. Temperatures are up into the lower 60s to the mid-70s across the area… much warmer than what we saw just 2 hours ago.

The tornado threat is very small, but not zero. Today’s main threats will be from large hail and damaging wind gusts.

Instability is starting to climb over the western half of the area as we are currently seeing CAPE values up to and over 500 J/kg. Mid-level lapse rates are up into the 6ºC-6.5ºC range, not too far away from that 7ºC hotspot that we look for with large hail. 0-6 km Bulk shear is already in that magic range above 50 knots. Helicity is still a little low over the western parts of the area, but the east and southeastern parts are in the magic range above 150-200 m2s2.

So as you can see, we have the ingredients in place, we just have to wait for the initiation to begin. I have a feeling with the sunshine we are seeing out there, it shouldn’t be too much longer. Stay weather aware. I’ll be back with another update in 2 hours, unless storms begin to fire.

Category: Alabama's Weather, ALL POSTS, Severe Weather

About the Author ()

Scott Martin is an operational meteorologist, professional graphic artist, musician, husband, and father. Not only is Scott a member of the National Weather Association, but he is also the Central Alabama Chapter of the NWA president. Scott is also the co-founder of Racecast Weather, which provides forecasts for many racing series across the USA. He also supplies forecasts for the BassMaster Elite Series events including the BassMaster Classic.

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