STABLE AIR IN PLACE, FOR NOW… Isolated rain showers are happening across Clarke, Monroe, and Conecuh counties on this Friday evening. These showers are mostly elevated, meaning sprinkles are happening but most of the rain isn’t actually reaching the ground. One reason we are not having significant weather issues at the moment is dewpoint temperatures at the surface continue to be low. You can clearly see that the areas of green on the map below (indicating areas of higher dewpoint values) remain over Mississippi and Louisiana. This is only one “ingredient” in thunderstorm formation, but low dewpoints are certainly helping us stay stable early this evening.
STORMS LIKELY TONIGHT… The forecast from this morning remains right on track, in that the chances of your location in south Alabama and northwest Florida seeing rain/storms will be highest overnight into Saturday morning. The greatest chance of strong to severe storms locally will be in Clarke, Choctaw, Washington, and Mobile counties, aka west Alabama. These are the counties that are included in the Level 2 “slight” risk zone in the latest convective outlook issued by the Storm Prediction Center. The rest of our area to the east (Pensacola, Crestview, Brewton, Atmore, Andalusia, Evergreen, Greenville) remain in a lower-end Level 1 marginal risk.
This is overall a low-end risk, yet please have a way to receive urgent weather warnings before you go to sleep tonight. It only takes one tornado to cause big issues!
TORNADO WATCH TO OUR WEST… Much of south central Mississippi (including the Jackson, MS metro area) and northern Louisiana are now under a Tornado Watch till 11PM CDT. Several severe thunderstorm warnings are in effect for a few Mississippi counties as of 4:37PM. See the image below to see a current satellite/radar composite view of Mississippi and Alabama.
I’ll have plenty more updates here in the RedZone Weather app (or rzweather.com if you’re reading this update there) over the next few hours. Friendly reminder: If you want to be alerted to these detailed updates, be sure to visit the Alerts tab in the bottom right corner of the app and then tap the large, yellow “Alert Settings” button to customize the alerts you want to receive. I send MANY Low-Level Alerts about articles just like this and much more. See you soon!