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After a dry start to the first week or so of 2012, it looks like the pattern is turning much wetter for the next several days, at least through early Wednesday. The main culprit helping to keep us wet is a frontal boundary that will become nearly stationary across Central and North Alabama over the next few days. This together with weak disturbances in the upper air flow pattern will combine to provide us with showery periods off and on. One of those is going on this morning with an abundance of small scattered showers showing up on radar. I recorded 4 hundredths of an inch in my gauge this morning, so enough to dampen the driveway.
With the front in the area meandering around, and little change in the upper air flow through Tuesday, we have to mention showers in the forecast. So this is not expected to be a rainout situation but simply showers here and there.
The closed low comes out of the Southwest US on Tuesday moving across Texas slowly and generating a surface low in the Northwest Gulf which moves into Louisiana. Nice to see the GFS and the European models in good agreement on the position of the surface low and the rain shield. The question about severe weather potential has to be raised. One element against severe weather is the timing since we won’t have the heat of the day to add to the situation since the front will be coming through the area around midnight. And as SPC has noted in their long range discussion, the shear appears to be there, but the question mark is the instability. Instability appears lacking, so this would significantly limit the severe potential. But the overall strength of this system dictates that we not dismiss the potential for severe weather, but keep a wary eye on future runs to see if the instability can work itself further north.
The closed low comes by on Wednesday bringing an end to the precipitation as a fast moving trough coming into the western Great Lakes helps to kick our cold core low out of the Southeast. The cold core scenario presents a problem in terms of some potential for snow. The greatest threat is over the Tennessee River Valley and it seems that it would be a quick snow event without any problems associated with it. But cold core lows can be tricky, so again we’ll watch the development of the system.
The latter part of the week ahead becomes dry and we stay relatively mild with no extreme cold. Another system takes shape behind this one, though, promising another round of rain for next Saturday. So the patter remains active.
As to rain, not everyone will get rain every day, however, the overall rain amount does appear to be significant with one and a half to two and a half inches of rain possible in some locations through the end of the rain early Wednesday morning.
The long range outlook does continue to show an absence of extreme cold. The active pattern shows another good shot at rain around the 19th with a cool down but nothing extreme and another trough around the 22nd.
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-Brian-
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