Unsettled Weather Today

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The somewhat unsettled weather pattern will remain in place for Central Alabama today, but take heart, it looks like we’ll get a couple of days off from rain chances on Monday and Tuesday.

An upper level trough was situated over western Arkansas this morning, so ahead of the trough as well as the surface front, showers and thunderstorms are likely to occur. Showers were ongoing this morning, with isolated strong storms embedded in the overall scattered area of showers. While we will likely see a little break in the shower action at mid-morning, additional isolated showers were showing up on radar in northern Mississippi, so we will see additional showers and thunderstorms until we can get the front and the upper trough to move by. That should happen this evening and into the early morning hours of Monday, paving the way for both Monday and Tuesday to be nice days.

As to severe weather today, SPC has not identified any slight risk area. We do note that instability remains sufficient for isolated storms to approach severe limits, however, it is likely to be another marginal day. Yesterday we saw a few storms barely reach into the severe criteria with a couple of reports of hail around 1 inch along with a report of a few trees down. All of the reports yesterday came in Fayette, Lamar, and Pickens counties. I think we’ll see a little less activity today than we saw yesterday.

Rainfall continues to be spotty with some spots getting less than a quarter of an inch but other spots getting 1 to 2 inches of rain. My rain gauge has been one of those cheated so far with only about 3 hundredths of an inch as of this writing.

With some weak upper ridging along with the passage of the cold front early Monday morning, Monday and Tuesday should be nice days with Tuesday probably the nicest with a morning start around 52 and an afternoon high around 80.

The next system, which is shaping up to bring winter back to the eastern half of the country, begins to dig into the Central Plains on Wednesday as a strong trough moves out of the northern Rockies into the Central Plains states. This trough is forecast to dig in Thursday and close off Friday. While the GFS and the ECMWF were really far apart yesterday, they have moved much closer in their solutions this morning. The GFS closes off the low over North Central Arkansas while the European closes it off over Northwest Arkansas. This sure improves confidence in the overall solution since the two are only miles apart instead of states apart as we saw yesterday. The closing off of the upper low will bring unusually cold air into the Central and Southeast US. The GFS MOS guidance has really backed off on the cold values, but that pattern sure looks cold to me, so I plan to stick with the idea of a pretty chilly weekend for us. There could be enough moderation to the air mass – after all, it is almost May – that we won’t push the record lows quite as much as I was suggesting yesterday, but I feel pretty sure that this pattern will drop lows into the 40s for Central Alabama. And highs Saturday will probably not get out of the 60s even though current MOS guidance is showing highs in the 70s.

The upper closed low is forecast to stick around through the weekend and into the first of next week. Cold core upper lows can be tricky to forecast, so perhaps the best forecast for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday is to describe the weather as unsettled. It appears right now that our best rain chances will come Friday with the possibility that Saturday will be dry but cloudy. With the upper closed low, I don’t think we can remove any mention of showers for Saturday and Sunday, but at least they should be scattered.

Looking further afield, the upper closed low gradually weakens and opens up moving onto the East Coast around the 7th. This should result in an overall chilly start to May. Ridging comes into play for the 8th, 9th, and 10th, and by the 11th and 12th, we’re watching another strong trough dig into the Central US, but this one not nearly as strong or as deep as the one we’re looking at for this coming weekend.

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Thanks for staying with the Blog. James Spann will be back with the next edition of the Weather Xtreme Video bright and early Monday morning. I hope that you have a great Sunday and Godspeed.

-Brian-

Category: Alabama's Weather