Well, not entirely because I think this is a very interesting case of an atmospheric change! Check out this horizontal profile of temperature and dew point at mid morning. The first number is temperature and the other one is dew point. Going from south to north and northwest:
78/73 Tallahassee
73/72 Dothan
73/70 Troy
70/66 Montgomery
68/44 Shelby County Airport
63/43 Tuscaloosa and Birmingham
61/37 Haleyville
63/41 Muscle Shoals
62/34 Nashville
56/34 Jackson, Tenn. (in West Tennessee)
36/27 Kansas City
23/16 Devils Lake, N.Dak., (noone wearing tank tops today, very windy)
* In the above list, notice a 26 degree drop in dew point between Troy and the Shelby County Airport
* A 32 degree drop between Montgomery and West Tennessee
This is a marked example how the cooler and much drier air is winning the battle in Alabama. The Cold front (er cool front) is well down into Central Alabama. As a result, showers and thunderstorms have been consined down into the SE corner of Alabama.
While we slept overnight, and the weather humans partially caught up on lost sleep, we had some action here in Central Alabama. Check out this note from Ronald Hughes, one of many very dependable ABC 33/40 Skywatchers. (We could not do without them)
Subject: Morning events in Coker
JB, heres a run down on this morning storm: Rainfall 1.13″ of which we received 1.10″ in 15 minutes with a RR of 25.04″/hr for about 3 minutes. PWG was 32 mph down in our little hole in Coker. Morning low was 58. Have a great day!
I will try to post some other 24 hour rain reports later this morning and one day soon, I want to write about a major dew point research project we did at the USWB/NWS at Birmingham Airport in the 1960s. It involved hours of time for the entire staff.
I am a huge dew point fan. I pay little attention to relative humidity. Even to this day, I make hourly plots of upstream dew points before finally arriving at the low for the night at BHM. It is part of an old-fashioned way. Come to think of it, I am still rather old fashioned, or some folks would say “odd-fashioned.” But life goes on.
