All Ahead Full – Nice, Stormy, Cold

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No rest for folks in the weather business for the next two weeks as the atmospheric flow remains active with a variety of weather coming our way. But for today, after the morning fog burns off in the 9 to 10 am time frame, we should see a mostly sunny day with highs returning to the lower and middle 60s, 61 is our 30-year average high for today while 39 is the low.

But a strong upper closed low will move out of the Rockies on Monday across the Red River Valley, and as it does a surface low will deepen as it moves eastward with a cold front trailing into the northwestern Gulf. The upper low will move across the Mid-South region along with the surface low. This should set the stage for severe weather mainly along the Gulf Coast from Houston to Tallahassee. But there remain some interesting uncertainties. The main uncertainty is just how far north the warm sector will move. The northward progression of the warm sector is going to depend in part on just how strong the cold air damming – or wedge – will be. And the models, while in fairly close agreement, do differ somewhat on projecting the conditions. I think the wedge is going to hold so that the warm sector does not get to Birmingham keeping the risk for severe weather across the southern third of Alabama, along and south of a line from about Livingston to Selma to Montgomery to north of Eufaula. See the video for the details.

Because of the uncertainties, we’ll be watching the evolution of conditions and make adjustments to this forecast as needed. But for now, it looks like the main threat of hail, damaging wind, and tornadoes will come across the southern third.

The system should blow through the area by Wednesday as the surface low reaches the eastern Great Lakes. Aloft, that deep upper low carves out a trough over the eastern half of the US, so we open the doors to the northern regions with temperatures gradually getting colder for the latter half of the week as traveling short waves help to reinforce the northwesterly flow and funnel more cold air southward.

Yesterday there was a rather large discrepancy between the GFS and the ECMWF on how far south and just how strong the cold air intrusion would be. Today, the models are still not quite the same but they are much closer to each other than they were yesterday. Interesting to note that it is the GFS that has been consistent with bringing the cold air deep into the South while the ECMWF has come to a closer agreement on this. The bottom line is that we should be seeing some pretty chilly days by next weekend with lows below freezing and highs only in the 40s.

Rainfall over the next 36 to 48 hours could be heavy with rainfall amounts of 1 to 3 inches possible. The heaviest rainfall is likely to come across the southern counties of Alabama, Montgomery area southward, with a fairly steep gradient to the north with the least amount of rain across the Tennessee River Valley.

As we move out into voodoo country, the weather does not get much better. The GFS projects a warm up with a nice upper air ridge around March 8th, but another deep upper low is forecast to drop into the Central US on the 10th. And if the GFS is right, we could see a bummer of a storm with severe weather and winter weather. So stay tuned!!

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My hope is that you will have time to enjoy the good weather today before the stormy weather arrives on Monday. You can stay with the Blog for updates on just how the weather plays out over the next couple of days. James Spann will be back with the next edition of the Weather Xtreme Video first thing Monday morning. Have a great Sunday and Godspeed.

-Brian-

Category: Alabama's Weather