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Many people in North Alabama, especially the Tennessee River Valley, woke up to thunder this morning! Not the best forecast I’ve ever made in my life, but absolutely a great example of how the large scale models can completely miss the development of mesoscale features. And that appears to be what happened. A complex of thunderstorms developed to our north along the stationary front stretching east to west along the Kentucky-Tennessee border. The complex proceeded to move southward with additional storms developing on the outflow of the initial storms. At this writing, a large cluster of storms stretched from just east of Hamilton in Marion County to Huntsville in Madison County. This cluster was moving southeasterly fairly quickly and will be affecting places like Guntersville, Cullman, Jasper, Oneonta, and Birmingham over the next couple of hours.
For me, I woke up to thunder which is not the favorite thing for my dog, Cheyenne, so we made a trip to the quiet of the basement room which blots out the light and most of the sound. What’s very frustrating is that I didn’t get a single drop of rain from that small thunderstorm!!
The morning run of the GFS is not picking up on the MCS currently underway. While the atmosphere has a way of recovering quickly, I do not see Birmingham reaching the 100 shown on the GFS MOS guidance today. In fact, some places in the Tennessee Valley and Central Alabama may not even reach the 90s today depending on the exact timing, development, and movement of the thunderstorms. The MCS is not the only thing that GFS seems to be clueless on! Watch the video and you will see that a certain tropical system also seems to be very underplayed by the GFS.
But what we have is the GFS, so it moves the ridge westward while at the same time flattens the ridge. This process will take several days, but eventually the ridge becomes quite flat and by Sunday/Monday time frame we begin to see weak troughiness develop over the eastern US. This should help to keep us out of the extreme heat while at the same time keeping fairly respectable chances for rain in the forecast.
Rainfall over the next five days could easily reach 2 to 3 inches in places. Again, these is the possibility that some spots get very little or none. Overall, though, it looks like many places will see at least some rain over the next couple of days.
SPC keeps a slight risk over parts of Alabama for today and a fairly large area over the Southeast US on Friday which includes nearly all of the state of Alabama.
Tropics are active with Emily. Emily remains a tropical storm and is not likely to intensify much. Right now the circulation of Emily is being disrupted by the terrain of Hispaniola. NHC track forecast still takes Emily into the Southwest Atlantic Ocean in a recurvature east of Florida. There remains some uncertainty as Emily has continued to progress further west than expected. As NHC noted in their discussion, much further west without a sign of movement on a northwest course, and some type of watch will be required for South Florida. Emily sure deserves a “stay tuned” at this time.
Long range GFS model predictions keep a weak trough over the eastern US through the middle of August with a return of the ridge by the 19th.
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Had a wonderful opportunity to talk weather with Taylor Hicks yesterday afternoon at The Summit. Taylor is a weather enthusiast and a Mac user, so he and I exchanged some notes on weather apps. I’m excited that he may be able to attend part of the national conference of the National Weather Association to be held in Birmingham in mid-October. He seemed pretty excited about it, too. Well, enjoy the day whatever the weather brings to your yard! Godspeed.
-Brian-
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