An all new edition of the ABC 33/40 Weather Xtreme video is available in the player below, and on iTunes…
MANY MANY PICTURES: Thanks to the hundreds of you who took the time to send pictures and video yesterday (scroll down through the blog to see them!). We are never able to post all of them here on the blog, but we do look at all of them, and during an event like yesterday they are all very helpful. Keep em coming… anytime you have images or video, just send them an attachment to [email protected]!
THE BLOG WILL BE BUZZING: The system that brought a dusting of snow to the grassy areas over parts of North Alabama yesterday is out of here this morning. There were very few travel issues with temperatures above freezing in most communities, and roads were simply wet, except for a few high terrain spots over Northeast Alabama. And, it was mostly an all rain event for Tuscaloosa, Birmingham, and points south. It won’t go down as a really memorable event, but could we be on the verge of a major winter storm that will go into the record books? Notice I have five question marks on the headline here, so nothing is carved in stone. I do recommend you take the time to watch the Weather Xtreme video for all of the graphics that go along with this discussion.
TODAY/TOMORROW: No weather issues for the next 36 hours. A southwest flow aloft continues, so today and tomorrow will be mostly cloudy and cool with highs in the 47 to 51 degree range. There should be a few peeks of sun as well.
THE NEXT SYSTEM: All models now agree that another storm will develop in the Northwest Gulf of Mexico Friday night. The big difference this time is that pure Arctic air will be entrained into the system, on the northern side. The placement of the Gulf wave, and the timing of the Arctic air will determine if we get snow. And, as usual, there is some model madness that prevents us from being too confident in any specific solution now.
LIKE THE NAM? The NAM is the North American Mesoscale model; it has a higher grid resolution with output to 84 hours, and quite frankly, performed much better on yesterday’s storm system. It goes wild on the 06Z run (the latest I have in hand), and suggests 5 to 10 inches of snow for the I-20 corridor that will begin Friday night, with snow well down into Central Alabama Saturday morning. If you believe this one, this storm will be one of the biggest snow events on record here (but not as big as the March 1993 blizzard!).
LIKE THE GFS? The GFS is the Global Forecast System. It is a global model and has output to 16 days. The GFS shunts almost all of the precipitation south of Montgomery with the wave, and keeps North Alabama dry as a bone. Zip, nothing, nadda. We note this model did not perform well yesterday.
OR, MAYBE THE UKMET? The United Kingdom Met Service model is a blend of the NAM and the GFS; it shows the precipitation over all of Alabama Saturday morning, but holds the Arctic air north of here and suggests only a brief chance to snow as the system pulls away during the day.
OUR FORECAST: The one big model error in yesterday’s system was timing; the models were way too slow. And, they were too warm; their surface temperature fields were almost 10 degrees too warm.
Having said that, we will lean toward the NAM, but not buying into the major snow storm solution for now.
I think some rain this time will roll in here Friday night, maybe even late Friday afternoon. We will mention a chance of rain before midnight, with a change to snow after midnight into Saturday morning. We simply can’t go overboard on any accumulation right now… but it certainly will be possible along the I-20 corridor, which might turn out to have the best shot at significant accumulation.
Snow flakes will be possible Saturday morning as far south as Montgomery.
All of the precipitation will end Saturday afternoon, and very cold air will continue to flow in here on strong north winds; we will have a hard time getting above the freezing mark on Saturday, and by Sunday morning we do down in the teens. We are forecasting an average low of 18 degrees. If, by chance, we have snow on the ground, we will probably have to lower that 18 to 8.
HOUSEKEEPING NOTES: We love all of the blog comments… yesterday was a fascinating day to keep up with your reports. Extremely helpful here in the weather office… the blog comments, along with our large Skywatcher team on our Instant Message conference, keeps us full of good information that we could only dream of having years ago.
We do ask, however, that you don’t post false reports about road conditions or weather conditions… we had a little of that yesterday which had to be removed.
And, the passion is simply amazing when it comes to winter weather in Alabama. It is like the Alabama-Auburn thing; it brings out some serious emotion in people. We don’t mind healthy arguments, but we don’t allow personal attacks. Those posts will be removed as well.
99.9 percent of our blog readers follow the guidelines and provide some very important information; we just ask that .1 percent to cool it with the attacks and false reports!
Needless to say, we will be watching the 12Z model runs this morning closely, and we will post updates here. If you want to follow along with model output and other weather data we use, I suggest our toolbox site full of great links.
I am speaking at Cherokee Bend Elementary School this morning… I will be back in the office by early afternoon, and the next Weather Xtreme video will be posted here by 3:30 or so this afternoon!
