Less Showers

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Numerous showers during the afternoon yesterday with a few lingering into the early night time hours produced a nice blanket of rain for most locations. A shower at my house brought about 4 tenths of an inch of rain. That moisture is responsible for some low clouds and fog this morning which should burn off fairly quickly this morning. It looks like precipitable water is down a bit across North Alabama so I expect to see the greater chance of showers south of about Clanton, but there is still a small risk of showers for much of Central Alabama.

The overall weather pattern for the next week does not change much. I think we stay fairly dry on Sunday, but see chances for showers return on Tuesday and for the rest of the week. The overall pattern of a trough along the eastern US with the ridge aligned along the eastern slope of the Rockies stays with us for much of the week as strong traveling weather systems gradually beat down the ridge and weaken the trough by Saturday. The GFS and the ECMWF remain in fairly good agreement with this pattern and both hint at a somewhat better chance of storms on Tuesday. And there continue to be signs of weak disturbances in the northwesterly flow, so we will have to be vigilant for the development of thunderstorm complexes that could produce long lasting clusters. Forecasting those will be in the short range since the models do not typically do a good job with those small scale features.

Looks like without much change in the pattern that we will continue to see lows in the lower 70s and highs in the lower and middle 90s for much of the week ahead.

The pattern remains somewhat quiet for severe weather, too, with a slight risk on Day 1 in and around the DC area which isolated severe storms are possible in the southeast US, Central and North Central US. Tropical Atlantic remains quiet though I do note a large cloud area coming off of Africa. About time to get into the climatological period for those disturbances to trek across the Atlantic.

Long range pattern as we venture into voodoo country becomes more dominated by an elongate ridge across the southern US. This could lead to another round of fairly hot weather for us around August 10 to 12th.

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Sometimes the summer weather pattern becomes tough to forecast with lack of strong identifiers to provide some detail in the forecast. Relying on the wording of daily chances for showers seems to be a cop out but does match our forecasting ability with weak features. Alas, this too will pass. I hope you have a great weekend. Next Xtreme Weather Video should be posted by 8 am or so on Sunday morning. Godspeed.

-Brian-

Category: Alabama's Weather