NICE NEW YEAR’S DAY; STORMS POSSIBLE LATE THURSDAY INTO FRIDAY… Happy New Year! We start off the year 2020 quite nice on this New Year’s Day but our focus is now on Thursday evening into Friday when we could have a few thunderstorms rumbling through our area. The Storm Prediction Center maintains a Level 1 (out of 5) low-end, marginal severe weather risk for late Thursday into Friday for part of our local area. An outlook upgrade has NOT happened, and SPC has modified the areas included in the Level 1 risk to include mainly western parts of southwest Alabama. A nice, sunny, cool weekend is upcoming after the rain on Friday! High temperatures will be around 60 on both Saturday and Sunday. Let’s look at your forecast details in this first forecast of 2020.
INCREASING CLOUDINESS TODAY… We start the day mostly sunny but you’ll notice cloud coverage increasing throughout the day. High temperatures will peak in the low-60s by 2-3PM. I am not expecting rain until after sunset. There is a low (10-20% chance) of a few small rain showers this evening after dark across the western fringes of southwest Alabama (Clarke, Washington, Mobile, Choctaw counties). Vast majority of the rain will hold off until Thursday evening.
LEVEL 1 RISK FOR PARTS OF SOUTHWEST ALABAMA THURSDAY… After this video was produced, the Storm Prediction Center modified the Level 1 risk zone. SPC now only includes parts of southwest Alabama in the Level 1 risk. Baldwin, Mobile, and Washington counties are included. The rest of our local counties are NOT included. This means if you are in Clarke, Monroe, Butler, Conecuh, Covington, Escambia (AL), Santa Rosa, Okaloosa, and Escambia (FL) counties, you’re now OUT of the severe weather risk zone and only in the “General Thunderstorms” zone. Good news!
MAIN CONCERNS: BRIEF TORNADOES & DAMAGING WIND GUSTS… The Level 1 risk zone across far southwest Alabama, southern Mississippi, and eastern Louisiana is where the focus on Thursday evening will be for a few strong storms capable of producing gusty winds and perhaps a tornado or two. The latest model trends suggests the severe weather risk will probably be greatest to our west across southern Mississippi and eastern Louisiana. This will probably shake out as just a good rain event for most spots across south Alabama and northwest Florida.
RAIN & STORM TIMING… A few showers may happen Thursday morning into the afternoon hours, but much of the rain will occur Thursday evening into Friday morning. Storms will be at their strongest from 3PM to 9PM to our west, but storms are most likely to slide through our area between 9PM Thursday and 3AM on Friday and will probably be much weaker when they move through our area. This is similar to what happened Sunday night. Storms were strong to our north and west but were basically just weak rain showers by the time they arrived in our local area.
RAIN AMOUNTS TO BE IN THE 1-3” RANGE… Most spots across south Alabama and northwest Florida will pick up between 1 to 2 inches of rainfall with this event Thursday into Friday. Some isolated spots may have upwards of 3 inches of rain, but that will probably be the anomaly and not the overall trend for the region.
NICER, DRY, SUNNY WEEKEND… All of the rain will clear out late Friday into early Saturday. Skies will clear out Saturday morning. The entire local area should be mostly sunny by midday Saturday. Clear skies will extend into Sunday. High temperatures will be in the low-60s each day with morning lows in the 40s.
SET UP APP ALERTS… We send quite a bit of Low-Level Alerts in our RedZone Weather app. The app is totally free for you! redzoneweather.com/app is the link where you see the download links to your respective app store for iOS and for Android devices. Once you have the app downloaded to your smartphone or tablet device, be sure to visit the Alerts tab to customize the alerts you would like to receive straight from me.
See all the graphics and details in the first #rzw forecast video of 2020. Have a great day!
