A Wet, Cool Saturday

An all new edition of the ABC 33/40 Weather Xtreme video is available in the player on the right sidebar of the blog. You can subscribe to the Weather Xtreme video on iTunes by clicking here.

Rain has moved into Central Alabama from the south and southwest just a little bit faster than I thought it would yesterday. The rain is the result of an impulse kicking out across Texas today generating a surface low in the Gulf of Mexico just south of New Orleans. It will be a wet day today and tonight, but the overall pattern moves briskly so the rain should be ending for much of the area by Sunday morning. We might even see some breaks in the clouds by late afternoon with a few peeks of some sunshine. But it is going to remain somewhat chilly with highs today approaching the 50-degree mark and the lower 50s on Sunday.

A reinforcing shot of cold air rolls in on Monday with highs struggling to reach the middle 40s. There won’t be a lot of moisture with this short wave coming through the long wave trough, however, there may be enough for a little light drizzle or perhaps some snow flurries especially north of Birmingham.

Unfortunately, as we saw yesterday, the models diverge fairly significantly as we hit the end of 2013. The GFS maintains the long wave trough over the eastern US which would keep us dry and chilly, but the ECMWF is more aggressive with the system on the first of January and bring a significant rain event to the Southeast US. For now, I think the European may be overdoing the amount of moisture with that system, so I’m siding with the dryer GFS solution. It is surely an evolving pattern.

By next weekend, yet another system is progged to come across the country promising another wet event that for now would come more into Sunday giving us a dry Saturday.

Rainfall during the next 18 to 24 hours will fairly heavy and widespread. I expect to see widespread rainfall amounts of 1 to 2 inches. The heavy rain should be in the area from about Clanton to Troy along the track of the surface low as it comes out of the Gulf across Southwest Georgia. Flash flood watches have been posted for about the northern two-thirds of Georgia for this afternoon and tonight.

FOOTBALL WEATHER: For those planning to attend the Allstate Sugar Bowl for the game between Alabama and Oklahoma at 7:30 pm on January 2, 2014, it looks like you will need to plan for rain going to or from the Superdome. The latest forecast suggests cloudy skies with showers possible. I’m not sure where they set the thermostat for the system inside the Superdome, but outside you should see highs in the lower 60s. Morning lows will be in the upper 40s. Too early for a specific forecast for the BCS Championship when the Florida State Seminoles meet the Auburn Tigers, but climatological data for Pasadena shows the average highs in January to be around 64 degrees and average lows around 48 degrees. MOS guidance for the days just before the game showed highs in the lower 70s and lows in the lower 50s. The Vanderbilt Commodores will take on the Houston Cougars at the Old Gray Lady in west Birmingham in the BBVA Compass Bowl on January 4, 2014 at noon. It looks like a terrific day for a football game. The game looks dry and temperatures Saturday will be near seasonal. The day starts off with lows around freezing with afternoon highs reaching the lower 50s.

Yesterday we saw the GFS flip from a cold pattern to a much warmer pattern for the eastern half of the country. That is still the idea looking out into voodoo country with a sizable ridge over the eastern half of the country around the 6th. But the GFS brings back the cold pattern with the long wave trough becoming re-established over the center of the US by the 12th of January.

And you can follow news and weather updates from ABC 33/40 on Twitter here. Stay in the know by following the whole gang – here’s the list…

I plan to post the next Weather Xtreme Video here by 8 am or so on Sunday morning. Stay dry and warm today and Godspeed.

-Brian-

Category: Alabama's Weather