It is a rainy, dreary and cool January day across Alabama. The kind of day that gives the first month of the year a bad name around these parts.
A broad area of precipitation continues across the country from the Upper Midwest, through the Great Lakes into the Mid-Atlantic states, then curving down in a broad swath through Kentucky, Tennessee, North Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and back into Louisiana.
The transition zone from liquid to freezing precipitation is across northeastern Kentucky, southern West Virginia, Virginia and down into North Carolina. North of this area, the precip is falling as snow. In the narrow freezing zone, it is a wintry mix of freezing rain and some sleet. South of the transition zone, it is falling as rain. Very little thunder involved, even over the South. There just isn’t much instability.
Across Alabama, a large solid area of light to moderate rain covers much of the state west of a line from Heflin to Talledaga to Clanton to Grove Hill. Some pockets of fairly heavy rain are over Northwest Alabama, mainly over Marion and Winston Counties. The rain area is moving slowly eastward.
Temperatures over the northern half of the state range from 41F in Muscle Shoals to 45F at Gadsden to 49F at Tuscaloosa and Birmingham.
The rain shield will continue moving eastward tonight, ending from the west during the evening, although a little light rain could occur behind the main area even into tomorrow morning. By tomorrow morning, the rain area should be somewhere in the general area of a line from Auburn to Montgomery to Greenville. I will call for mostly cloudy skies tomorrow in our area with a high in the middle 50s.
The morning run of the GFS now paints a very different scenario for later in the week, downplaying the Gulf low and emphasizing a southeastward moving Clipper low over the Northeast U.S. that will develop into an Atlantic storm. If this scenario plays out, we will have little in the way of rainfall on Wednesday, and no threat of wintry pecipitation. We will wait for additional model runs to confirm this trend.
