Stormy Saturday

***Note: No video this morning due to limited bandwidth at my location. Will try to have one tomorrow morning.***

I am downtown providing weather support to the 2010 Schaeffer Eye Center Crawfish Boil festival. They had a great night last night and should have pretty good weather for the event today with scattered showers a possibility.

But it looks like to our northwest the weather will stay very unsettled with another big round of severe weather. The SPC already has a number of tornado watches covering portions of Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas and Mississippi. The SPC has outlooked a moderate risk area running from about 100 miles southwest of Memphis northeast to southwest Illinois. The moderate risk area is surrounded by a large area of slight risk that takes in a portion of Northwest Alabama.

A long line of thunderstorms was already occurring this morning from near Lexington, KY, to Nashville, TN, to Memphis, TN. A small area of thunderstorms was also occurring in Northwest Alabama from near Fayette to Athens. The storms in Alabama were moving northeast at 45 mph.

Moisture increased overnight across Central Alabama with dew points this morning in the mid and upper 60s with lower 70 dew points along the Gulf coast. A deep trough in the Central US is butting heads with a strong ridge over the Southeast US. This will result in little forward progress of the weather keeping the major threat of severe weather to the northwest of us today and bringing that threat into this area Sunday before the system finally exits to the east on Monday. The upper air pattern weakens somewhat by Monday with the trough still to our west.

Surface lows will likely ripple up the surface frontal boundary today and Sunday enhancing the likelihood of severe weather. Upper level wind with a strong mid level jet, the low level moisture, and the favorable deep layer shear will all combine to produce conditions favorable for supercell thunderstorms especially in the moderate risk area.

Because the ridge holds strong, the trough remains to our west through Monday and gradually weakens as it kicks out over the ridge which will dampen some. The result will be nice weather from late Monday through much of the upcoming week. The main storm track/westerlies will stay north of us allowing temperatures to climb back into the 80s for highs with lows mainly in the 60s.

While Central Alabama is not under the gun today like we were a week ago, it is still a good idea to keep up with the latest weather information and make sure you have your severe weather plan in mind. I expect to see some warnings in Alabama this afternoon and tonight and we do want everyone to be safe.

Godspeed.

-Brian-

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