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Thanks to J.B. for burning the midnight oil last night and early this morning keeping up with those rogue storms that formed over the eastern side of the state. You can scroll down to read the ongoing event; that storm that moved through Childersburg was in response to an impulse rotating down the back side of the Atlantic coast upper trough. Tallapoosa County also had a doozy of a storm between 10:15 and midnight last night; our friends in Alexander City and Dadeville, and around Lake Martin really had a gob of lightning and some very heavy rain in spots. Of course, through this a large percentage of North and Central Alabama remained dry.
Really this morning the synoptic scale isn’t much different. We have the upper trough just east of here, and a nice dewpoint gradient from north to south across Alabama. The dewpoints in Huntsville this morning is only 54; it rises to 60 at Birmingham, and then jumps to 66 at the Shelby County Airport and 70 at Montgomery. The better chance of showers and storms today will remain over the eastern and southern counties, closer to the upper trough and in the deeper moisture. Like yesterday, any showers or storms will move from north to south, generally speaking. Afternoons will remain hot, with mid to upper 90s for West Alabama, and highs closer to 90 near the Georgia border over far East Alabama.
The weather won’t change all that much through the weekend; a few widely scattered showers and storms, especially over the eastern third of Alabama. The GFS looks bone dry over the weekend, but you can’t rule out a shower or storm somewhere in this kind of pattern.
NEXT WEEK: We remain optimistic about increased rain chances toward the middle of next week. The 00Z GFS is a tad slower, but continues to develop a nice upper trough from the Great Lakes down into the Deep South, with numerous showers and storms by Tuesday night and Wednesday.
AIR QUALITY ALERT: We have a code orange ozone alert for the Birmingham metro area today (Jefferson and Shelby Counties), meaning air quality is expected to be unhealthy for sensitive groups, like people with asthma and respiratory problems.
TROPICS: All remain quiet across the Atlantic basin, but the water in the Gulf of Mexico sure is getting warm. A peek at data from the Dauphin Island Sea Lab as I write this shows the water temperature at 84 degrees.
WEATHER PARTY: Get all the latest weather news over on our sister site, WeatherParty.com. Be sure and register while you are there; you can submit stories and vote on them to determine what is published on the front page. Plenty of very interesting articles over there…
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Some great viewer pictures were posted last night on the blog here and here… be sure and check them out. If you have digital images or video to send us, the address is [email protected].
I will be speaking at Summer Quest today at Hunter Street Baptist Church… then it is back to the office where I will have the afternoon Weather Xtreme video posted by 3:30. I might post a little early today, in fact, due to the speaking and travel schedule.
