The Wednesday morning edition of the ABC 33/40 Weather Xtreme video is available on the player below, and on iTunes:
Pretty cold out there this morning; most everybody is below freezing. One of our Skywatchers in the western part of Hueytown reports 25 degrees right now; we will run down a full list of morning lows here on the blog a little later this morning. Today will feature lots of sunshine with a high in the 50s, and the weather won’t be nearly as windy as yesterday.
WARMING UP: We will be close to 60 tomorrow, and up in the mid 60s on Friday as a nice warming trend begins. By Saturday and Sunday we should be flirting with the 70 degree mark. Moisture levels will be increasing, but the big rain problem Friday through Sunday will be northwest of Alabama; a strip of heavy rain will develop in the broad area from Texarkana, AR to Columbus, OH… the latest QPF guidance suggests 7.5 inches in the southeast corner of Missouri and far western Kentucky. Someone up there will probably have some flooding issues before the rain is over.
Around here, we will mention some risk of isolated showers Friday and Saturday, but both of those days should be mostly dry with some good intervals of sunshine.
The GFS continues to slow the system down; the 06Z run holds off the main band of rain until Monday of next week. I do think the slower solution is probably correct, based on other systems in recent weeks, so I will probably bump temperatures up and raise the rain chances on Monday. We also note that the Storm Prediction Center has much of Alabama in a severe weather risk with this band of storms; it will be like the past two systems with low CAPE and high shear… we will have to keep an eye on the situation. Not a classic severe weather setup at all, but you don’t have to have all of the parameters in place for problems.
NEXT WEEK AND BEYOND: Think cold. If you plan the energy budget for your business (or home for that matter!), be aware your gas/power bills will be rising big time over the latter half of January as much of the continental U.S. will be flooded with very cold air from time to time. Just look at the observations over Alaska and the northern part of the North American continent, and you can’t ignore them.
The first cold wave moves in here Monday night and Tuesday of next week. Yep, the American global model (the GFS) has the moisture confined to the southern half of the state on Tuesday and Wednesday (an overrunning pattern), which tends to lessen the risk of any freezing rain here in Alabama at that time, but it develops a major storm in the northern Gulf toward the end of next week and the following weekend, around January 19-20, with potential for some ice problems on the northern periphery of the precipitation shield. Maybe some big ice problems. This is beyond seven days, in “voodoo land”, where we don’t like to make specific forecasts. But, there is no doubt the trend is for very cold air (although shallow) to be in place near the surface, with an overrunning event at some point. Might be the first half of the week, might be toward the end of the week. And, there is no way of knowing where the greatest ice threat will be right now. All we can do is wait and watch.
More cold air floods the nation in the January 21-25 time frame. All models tend to agree with this, and I have fear it might be colder than many people imagine in many places across the fruited plain.
WEATHERPARTY: Check out our sister site, weatherparty.com… lots of fun weather news over there, and if you register you can submit links and vote on them to determine what is published on the main page.
Headed out to see the great Alabama weather legend, J.B. Elliott… he will be the proud owner of a new iMac this morning. Gotta love a new computer upgrade… I will have the next Weather Xtreme video posted by 3:30 or so this afternoon!
