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It was a stormy day across the Southeast and Central Alabama yesterday and the radar is already active this morning with a cluster of storms in West Central Alabama. With plenty of deep moisture in place and the presence of a decaying frontal boundary, it looks like we should see another stormy day across Central Alabama. Highs will once again top out around 90 or so which is probably going to be true for much of the first of the week.
A large upper ridge builds across the Southeast toward the latter part of the week promises some hotter temperatures. While showers will be possible just about any day, the showers should become more isolated as we get to mid week and into next weekend. The GFS seems to indicate something more than isolated, but I think the upper pattern with that strong ridge would support only isolated afternoon and early evening storms.
Attention is also focused on the Atlantic where Bertha continues to chug away after surviving a trip across a cooler section of tropical water. With shear low and water temperatures rising, Bertha could become a hurricane late Monday or Tuesday. The spaghetti plots of the model solutions was slightly better this morning. I noted yesterday the various models differed by about 1300 miles which is a pretty big difference. While you expect the solutions to diverge as you get further into the future, the clustering on the latest run was a bit more like what we expect to see. Bertha may still take advantage of a weakness in the upper ridge but it looks like it will swing a bit closer to the Bahamas before recurving. Because of the current track and the associated errors with long range predictons, Bertha will bear some watching.
Rainfall amounts will continue to be quite varied with the convective nature of the storms. Oxford reported about 2 inches of rain in 40 minutes yesterday, but where I am on Mt. Cheaha, only a few miles east of Oxford, we recorded only 12 hundredths of an inch. Hopefully, with time, the distribution of showers will be fairly even and we all get some rain.
I went ahead and included some photos at the start of the video of the animals I’ve photographed on this trip to Mt. Cheaha. If you want to blame someone, blame my friend Chuck Biddinger for asking for some animal photos. No, I didn’t include all 350 I’ve taken so far – just a few to give you the flavor of what we’ve seen here. This is has been one of the most glorious trips we’ve ever made to Mt. Cheaha with lots of animals to watch and great weather – cool in fact!!
I hope you have a great Sunday. Be sure to give lots of respect to the storms and do not become a lightning statistic. James Spann should be back tomorrow morning around 7 am with the next edition of the Weather Xtreme Video. God bless.
-Brian-
