Potential For Severe Thunderstorms Wednesday

CLOUDLESS SKY: What a delightful day across the great state of Alabama. Sunshine in full supply; temperatures generally in the low 70s at mid-afternoon. The average high for Birmingham on April 27 is 77. Tonight will be clear and cool with a low between 48 and 54 for most communities.

Tomorrow will be another dry day with a big warm-up; we project a high close to 80 degrees with a partly sunny sky. Clouds will increase tomorrow night ahead of the next approaching storm system.

SEVERE STORMS POSSIBLE WEDNESDAY: A cold front will slice into Alabama Wednesday, and will bring the threat of strong, possibly severe thunderstorms by afternoon. SPC maintains a “marginal risk” (level 1/5) of severe thunderstorms for areas south of a line from Winfield to Vinemont to Fort Payne.

A band of weakening showers and storms will move into the state early Wednesday morning, followed by a midday lull. Then, additional thunderstorms should form Wednesday afternoon. If the air can sufficiently destabilize, then severe storms will be possible with potential for mainly large hail and strong to locally damaging winds. A tornado can’t be ruled out.

The main window for strong to severe thunderstorms Wednesday will come from around 12:00 noon to 8:00 p.m. Rain amounts of around 1 inch are likely over the northern half of the state, and the rain will end by 10:00 to midnight.

THURSDAY THROUGH THE WEEKEND: Dry air returns to the state Thursday; the sky will be mostly sunny with a high between 68 and 73. Then, the weather will remain rain-free Friday through the weekend with sunny days, fair nights, and a warming trend. The high Friday will be in the upper 70s, followed by low 80s Saturday, and mid 80s Sunday.

NEXT WEEK: Dry, warm weather continues Monday and Tuesday with highs in the mid to upper 80s, about ten degrees above average for early May in Alabama. There will be some risk of showers Wednesday or Thursday, but for now it doesn’t look like a big rain event. See the Weather Xtreme video for maps, graphics, and more details.

NINE YEARS AGO TODAY: I still don’t have the words to describe the generational tornado outbreak of April 27, 2011. In Alabama, 62 tornadoes touched down. A total of 252 were killed, over one thousand more injured. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Rick Bragg is a gifted writer, and his words in Southern Living written after that horrible day perhaps are appropriate:

“Where the awful winds bore down, massive oaks, 100 years old, were shoved over like stems of grass, and great pines, as big around as 55-gallon drums, snapped like sticks. Church sanctuaries, built on the Rock of Ages, tumbled into random piles of brick. Houses, echoing with the footfalls of generations, came apart, and blew away like paper. Whole communities, carefully planned, splintered into chaos. Restaurants and supermarkets, gas stations and corner stores, all disintegrated, glass storefronts scattered like diamonds on black asphalt. It was as if the very curve of the Earth was altered, horizons erased altogether, the landscape so ruined and unfamiliar that those who ran from this thing, some of them, could not find their way home.

We are accustomed to storms, here where the cool air drifts south to collide with the warm, rising damp from the Gulf, where black clouds roil and spin and unleash hell on Earth. But this was different, a gothic monster off the scale of our experience and even our imagination, a thing of freakish size and power that tore through state after state and heart after Southern heart, killing hundreds, hurting thousands, even affecting, perhaps forever, how we look at the sky.”

We have learned much over the last nine years about the event; involving both physical science and social science. We must take the lessons learned to help mitigate loss of life during every severe weather event. Days like April 27, 2011 come along in Alabama once about every 40 years, but we will be better even on “routine” severe weather days thanks to what we know now.

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