Winter Knocking Again

The latest edition of the ABC 33/40 Weather Xtreme video is available in the player below. You can subscribe to the Weather Xtreme video on iTunes by clicking here.

Another great day in Central Alabama with sunshine and temperatures reaching the lower 60s. Clouds are already visible on the western and southwestern horizons, so we’ll see an increase in those today. But the sunshine should still be plentiful, so I expect to see most locations reach the lower 60s for highs today.

A cold front was poised this morning across the Central Plains and it will be moving through the Southeast on Monday. Looks like it should be moving through the Birmingham area around daybreak, so Monday is expected to be a wet, cloudy day with temperatures remaining in the 40s. It will be a tad warmer to the east and south of Birmingham since the cold air won’t arrive until a bit later, but even there temperatures will rise very little if at all once the cold front arrives.

A surface low will develop Monday in the Gulf of Mexico and move across the Florida peninsula before heading up the East Coast of the US. The main course of this low and it’s strength are not enough to bring any kind of significant snow to Central Alabama or the Southeast. In fact, the current track of the GFS plus the other models suggests that the worst weather will probably be held offshore. I’m sure that is probably great news for the Mid-Atlantic States where they were facing what could have been a major snow storm.

For us it looks like a pretty classic set up for the cold air to arrive as the moisture exits. This means that Monday afternoon and evening we could see a brief changeover to sleet or snow flurries, but the prospects of any accumulation seem close to nil. A sizable patch of moisture in the cold northwest flow on Tuesday afternoon is less impressive on this run for Central Alabama, but there is still the prospect of seeing some snow flurries with the passage of that moisture Tuesday afternoon and evening.

It’s pretty clear that winter is not over with this latest round of very cold Arctic air. By Wednesday morning, I expect to see low temperatures dancing around the 20-degree mark. Since this air is Arctic, I expect to see lows fairly uniform across the area.

It will be another cold morning Thursday before the moderation starts so that by afternoon we should see highs fairly typical for early February – around the middle 50s. And by Friday and Saturday we will see highs pushing the 60-degree mark.

Well into voodoo country, another storm system promises some wet weather around the 11th before we go under a strong ridge keeping us dry for the mid-February time period. And with a ridge in place, it will be difficult for fronts to bully their way through the Southeast.

Don’t forget to listen to our weekly netcast anytime on the web or on iTunes. This is the show all about weather featuring many familiar voices including our meteorologists here at ABC 33/40. You can even listen here on the blog; look for the player on the top left.

And you can follow our news and weather updates from ABC 33/40 on Twitter here. And, my personal Twitter feed is here if you want to keep up with the adventures and mis-adventures in my life. Twitter is a short messaging service you can receive via the web, cell phone, or IM.

My wife and I had a wonderful day in Troy on Saturday enjoying the Pike Piddlers Storytelling Festival. The place was sold out and the storytellers were absolutely superb. Alabama has such a treasure in Katherine Tucker Windham and is also very fortunate to draw tellers like Donald Davis, Carmen Deedee, and Bil Lepp. Next weekend I’ll be attending a meeting to formally create the Alabama Storytelling Association whose mission will be to promote storytelling.

Enjoy this last warm day for a while and I hope you have a wonderful upcoming week. Godspeed.

-Brian-

Category: Uncategorized