Sunshine Returns, Then Unsettled Weather Midweek

FORECAST:

Monday (High 50, Low 37): Gradually decreasing clouds throughout the day. Seasonably cold. 

Tuesday (High 56, Low 27): Sunny. Seasonably cold. 

Wednesday (High 60, Low 36): Partly to mostly sunny. Isolated showers are possible. 

EXTENDED OUTLOOK:

Thursday (High 60, Low 37): Partly cloudy with a 20% chance of showers. 

Friday (High 64, Low 46): Rain likely. 

Saturday (High 65, Low 48): Partly to mostly sunny with a 20% chance of showers. 

Sunday (High 66, Low 42): Sunny. 

PRONÓSTICO:

Lunes (Máxima 50, Mínima 37): Nubes que disminuirán gradualmente durante el día. Frío estacional.

Martes (Máxima 56, Mínima 27): Soleado. Frío estacional.

Miércoles (Máxima 60, Mínima 36): Parcialmente a mayormente soleado. Es posible que haya lluvias aisladas.

PERSPECTIVA EXTENDIDA:

Jueves (Máxima 60, Mínima 37): Parcialmente nublado con un 20 % de probabilidad de lluvias.

Viernes (Máxima 64, Mínima 46): Probabilidad de lluvia.

Sábado (Máxima 65, Mínima 48): Parcialmente a mayormente soleado con un 20 % de probabilidad de lluvias.

Domingo (Maxima 66, Mínima 42): Soleado.

NOTES:

SKYWARN classes are scheduled in-person and online ahead of the Spring severe weather season. These are free, so if you've never taken one and want to learn about severe weather, please, be our guest. I say "our", but I'm just a spotter. It's NWS employees that teach these classes. Although I've taken so many over the years, I'm very confident I could teach one if I was ever asked to. 

And here's a look back at that great snow we had on January 10th. Thanks to NWS Birmingham for taking the time to put that together. Sometimes lately they're the only office who is keeping up their website with really good archives. They used to all do that around here. Maybe it'll come back in fashion, but probably not, because the rocks are getting dumber these days. But we'll see. 

DISCUSSION:

Here at 7:35 PM we have light rain falling in Cullman. The temperature is 43 degrees. The dewpoint temperature is also 43, making the relative humidity 100%. Fun fact: It's usually raining when the humidity is 100%. The air is saturated, which is different than saturated fat, but I don't have time for a detailed meteorology lesson tonight. Plus I always strike out with nutrition, even trying to understand it. They can't make up their minds, you know? Now it's proteins that are going to save you, and breads are the great evil, starches. Before that, they had this food pyramid where the cornerstone was breads and starches, and you were supposed to watch how much meat or peanut butter you ate. And before that it was the four food groups. So that's a little consolation. Even the experts can't make up their minds. So suddenly I feel better about not knowing what to eat to slim myself down. Although I gotta' say, that covid diet of almost nothing but soup was effective. I lost about 13 pounds in a week or two. 

Where were we on the weather? Oh yeah, light rain, 43 degrees, 100% humidity in the great state of Cullman at this hour. Visibility is down to 8 miles in this cool rain tonight. Pressure is 30.26 inches and steady. And the wind is calm. 

We've had some fog with the rain the past few hours, and this visibility of 8 miles is actually an improvement. 

Our High today was 45 with a morning Low of 28. And overall it was a cloudy day off and on with periods of light rain. And we're back to light rain tonight. 

Which is reflected on the radar. Which I guess is why we call it reflectivity. Reflected. Reflectivity. Got a nice ring to it eh? Do I sound like I have tourette's? More than Ben Shapiro? Har har har . . . 

All right, but this is just a nice cold rain tonight. The lightning, as you can see on the satellite imagery, has stayed mainly down in Louisiana and parts of Mississippi. The air is really cool and stable up this way. 

And the weather setup is pretty clear, a cold front moving through the Southeast tonight into tomorrow morning. 

By Noon tomorrow we should be in the clear with high pressure already building back into the region from out West. We'll see clouds gradually decrease during the day. Doubt we even see a lingering shower in the morning. High should get up to about 50 degrees after a Low tonight/in the morning of about 37. Winds will turn back to North/Northwest but should stay light behind this front. It's not a really strong one. 

High pressure moving down around Mobile and in the Gulf of Greenland (hey, if the shrub can rename it, so can I) on Tuesday. And we'll be sunny with a High of about 55-56, Low about 27-28. Winds staying light. 

For Wednesday and Thursday, the deterministic model guidance has become just about worthless, and I don't feel like finding the best link to the ensembles that would give a better look at what's going on than deterministic model runs. As much as I love the National Weather Service, their website is often a shambles now, just a big disorganized mess. And I'm not as good at sorting through it all as I used to be. Everybody else seems to have gone to getting their graphics from WeatherBell and Pivotal Weather. But I love the NWS stuff when I actually have it all organized. It's just that they change things around and then leave broken links and half-functioning sites. And I tried to write somebody on one of those sites asking about stuff, specifically the National Blend of Models data and Model Output Statistics being phased out. And I never heard anything back. So I'm guessing that site had an outdated e-mail address to somebody who wasn't even over that department anymore, something like that. 

That's just life though. I used to think it was just fast food work, back when I worked at a burger palace allegedly known as Mickey D's to its friends. It was such chaos and so unprofessional, like one time a manager actually got on to me for not serving a piece of quarter meat I'd dropped on the floor and using the five-second rule. I threw it away, and she got mad. Joked about taking it out of my paycheck, didn't actually do it. And back then, I thought it was just fast food that was that way. But no, the chaos is everywhere. It's on college campuses, and . . . well . . . I'm not telling anybody anything they don't already know. At least it's usually harmless. The only times I get too bent out of shape about it is like, this woman I worked with at that fine dining establishment said she had a cousin who went to the hospital with a broken leg. (This was not in Cullman County, don't worry. I'm not gonna' say where it was.) They got careless and gave him the wrong kind of medicine, and he died. I think they gave him something that was meant for another patient with stomach problems. And all he needed was like pain medicine for his leg. He just innocently took the medicine without checking, and as poor Jessie put it, she would always laugh and say, "And he DIED . . . !"

Like she just couldn't believe it. This was no minor screw-up. They gave him the wrong medicine, and . . . goodbye Earl, as the Dixie Chicks would say. Out go the lights. 

Despite her trying to laugh it off, that's when it quits being amusing. And the National Weather Service has a mission statement to protect life and property. They take the "life" part very seriously. And for all my clowning and rambling here tonight, I'm being serious about that part. They work as hard as anybody I've ever seen to protect people's lives when the weather gets dangerous, even from something like a snow or ice storm. So I can forgive them for having disorganized web sites. Very easily. I cannot forgive AccuWeather for . . . more mortal sins than I care to enumerate at this time. I just love making new friends that way, like one of their people might read this and hear how often I sing their praises . . . 

Not totally joking. I think AccuWeather totally sucks. And the National Weather Service actually cares about what's important. They don't name winter storms. That's the Weather Channel. I think somebody there was dropping acid when they came up with that idea. As in lysergic acid. The old-fashioned stuff that isn't good enough for Joe Rogan, LSD instead of DMT. Or maybe somebody just got a bad hot dog one night and went nuts. But I've never understood naming winter storms. 

Believe it or not, I'm not on anything but tomato soup and barbecue pizza (the cheap kind, so maybe it had roadkill in it) tonight while I'm doing all this crazy rambling. A strange mood has come over me as I'm listening to Coyote J. Calhoun's Cemetery of Rock on 101.5 FM WJLX out of Jasper. Maybe it's his bad influence. But the music sure is great. 

I've rambled for so long, I better show those weather maps again. So nobody has to scroll back up to see them. 

Yeah, so, given the disorganized nature of model data on NWS websites and my feeling lazy tonight, I'm just using these WPC graphics for when things get unsettled on Wednesday and Thursday. A closed Low will be slowly working its way in our direction from out West. You saw it above in the raw GFS model output, already on its way. Now you don't see the pronounced pressure lines (isobars), but you can see the L for Low pressure system. A frontal boundary will be out in Texas and down into the Gulf of Greenland (yahahahahaha!) with the moisture getting close enough to bring us chances for rain, but staying pretty isolated. 

Both days we'll just have a 20% chance of rain and Highs near 60, Lows in the upper 30's. 

And the truth is, at some point I need to be the one who gets organized. And find one of the bigwigs at the National Weather Service and just ask them, straight out, where they moved a lot of the stuff I used to take for granted, I had neatly organized into a bunch of bookmarks. 

The GFS has a good handle on Friday, so I'm showing it again. I like seeing that closed Low on the 500 millibar map, even though it's a forecast map five days out from now. Rain is likely on Friday with a High in the mid-60's, Low in the mid-40's. 

Overall I think Saturday will be mostly sunny with a High in the mid-60's, Low in the upper 40's. These latest model runs are showing rapid clearing, here on the American model but also on the European model, not shown here. Some previous runs have shown lingering rain Saturday. I'll keep a 20% chance of rain in there in case anything lingers into the morning anyway. 

Then Sunday looks sunny, High in the mid-60's, Low of about 40 or so. 

And it now looks like we may see an average of about two inches of rain in the region over the next seven days. 

CHATTER:

I think I got most of the chatter over with and interrupted the forecast discussion with it. But another great Chuck Doswell memory from the Weatherbrains podcast. Somebody asked him who he was taking with him chasing these days. And I think the show was in 2012 or earlier. But he said, "My chase partner now is my wife." And people seemed surprised. So he said, "Well, she's a lot better to share a motel room with than Al Moller!" And Brian Peters was on there. He laughed and said he hoped Al was listening. So yeah, I guess that had to be way back in the day. That memory just randomly recurred tonight. 

I tried some calculus tonight and actually finished the lesson with only one mistake. First time in a long time trying something that challenging that might veer me back onto the right path with meteorology eventually. I need to review functions from just basic algebra though before I make much progress there. 

It occurs to me that the one thing that never changed about nutrition is that they still say vegetables are good for you. But who likes to eat those things? 

Nah, actually I like squash and turnip greens. And those are technically vegetables. So not all vegetables are bad. I'm learning tolerance. Diversity, equity, and inclusion might not have gone over so well in politics, but in food, it can work pretty good. Some foods are more equal than others though. And an ice cream sundae is better than any vegetable. Don't worry about its nutritional value. It's totally worth dying for. People kill themselves for far less all the time. I say satisfy your taste buds and live and die happy. 

(Goofy weather guy yanked off stage with a cane, by the neck.)