Brrrrrr-iefly Cold ! !

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Looks like James or JB left the freezer door open all night as Central Alabama is waking up to temperatures in the 30s. Clouds this morning should give way to sun this afternoon, thought I do not expect the sun to have much of an effect on making us feel warm. With the clouds, you can expect to see a few sprinkles or some snow flurries, but there won’t be much in the way of precipitation. Also with a strong northwesterly flow and a fairly tight pressure gradient, the wind will be blowing at 14 to 25 mph with gusts to 30 mph, so a wind advisory is in effect until sunset today.

With that strong cold air advection underway and clear skies tonight, I expect to see temperatures by Sunday morning fall into the teens, so this will be the coldest we’ve seen in 2012 since we saw the lower 20s on January 4th. We won’t warm up much on Sunday with highs nudging into the lower 40s.

But take heart, the warming trend begins on Monday after another cold morning we should see a high climb into the lower 50s. But clouds will be coming back quickly with a shot at some rain Monday night and into Tuesday morning. The rain should blow by quickly ending during the day Tuesday. We come under a ridge on Wednesday with two troughs developing off to our west. And this is where some model differences crop up. Not complete model madness, but differences in timing and precip amounts.

The GFS shows us dry on Wednesday while the European is much more aggressive on bringing a large area of rain right up to the Alabama-Mississippi line on Wednesday. The GFS suggests the system will blow by quickly with only small rain amounts while the ECMWF brings much heavier rains to Central Alabama on Thursday. While both bring rain to us on Thursday, the GFS is showing much lighter amounts. Both suggest rain on Thursday, so it becomes a question of just how much.

By Friday and into next weekend, both models bring the low over northern Mexico out into the Lower Mississippi River Valley but keep the bulk of the precipitation south along the coast and into the northern Gulf. This is almost verging into voodoo so we’ll probably keep a small chance of rain in the forecast, but with the model differences this may be a situation with forecast changes that late in the forecast period.

Looking into week 2, the main trend seen in the GFS is a warm one. The GFS forecasts a persistent southwesterly flow across the Southeast US, so we should see a mild pattern for that week with some wet weather around February 24th. But then, you know how those long range forecasts can be! The trend certainly suggests mild.

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Nice to have Colonel Sanders handling the duties today. I do expect to see Col. Peters back at the helm Sunday morning with the next edition of the Weather Xtreme Video. Godspeed.

-Brian-

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Category: Alabama's Weather