Thanks to the gang here for allowing me a little down time. I will write about a few of the week's highlights later... but it has been great spending time with family over the past seven days.
Trying to get a good briefing this afternoon... the two big issues involve the risk of severe weather tomorrow night and Monday, and a big change to cold weather in about 6 days.
SEVERE WEATHER THREAT: Looks like we will have our main threat of severe weather from about midnight tomorrow night through 8:00 a.m. Monday. Can't rule out an isolated tornado, but large hail and strong straight line winds would seem to be the main threat here. These storms will be ahead of a pre-frontal trough. The actual front comes in early Monday afternoon, and I guess some additional development is possible on the front; we will have to watch for that.
Best chance of organized severe storms during the pre-dawn hours Monday seems to be north of I-85 and east of I-65.
We note the new 18Z NAM only shows 0.07" of rain for Birmingham.
COLD WEATHER RETURNS: I am sure this will generate some nasty e-mail, but I just can't see how we have highs in the 50s and lows in the 30s at the end of the week. Even my old nemesis, the GFS MOS, has a high of 39 degrees in Birmingham on Friday. I can't disagree with that. The cold will be especially stinging after the recent mild snap. For the 50s/30s lovers, hold off on the hate mail until a week from now... we will see who is right then!
COVERAGE: What a clash... a severe weather threat on the biggest football day of the year. ABC 33/40 is pretty much wall to wall football Monday, including the Auburn game at noon. Thankfully, it looks like the severe weather threat will be well to the east of here by football time. If by chance something does come up during the afternoon, we will be using our new live Internet stream plus the "dot twos"... 33.2 and 40.2 on the digital side. If we have tornado warnings we will have a small box open on the main signal. We will take the weather coverage full screen if we indeed have a real tornado emergency. But, with today's technology we can air both football and severe weather coverage at the same time.
And, once again, it is very unlikely we will have a conflict anyway if our current thinking is correct.
RADAR: Our radar system atop Double Oak mountain developed a problem last week... I am not sure we can have the problem resolved in time for the storms tomorrow night. With the holiday/vacation situation we are running on a skeleton staff on the engineering side. So... the static images on the web site are not available right now. However, you can use our new live stream to watch the NEXRAD images anytime. There is a big link on the front page of the ABC 33/40 site:
http://www.abc3340.com/weather/
When you bring up the video window, you can move your mouse over the video and see two icons which give you the option to bring up the video in a Real Player window, which allows you to size the video anyway you want, or a full screen "theatre" option.
We will have plenty of updates here as the event gets closer... the 00Z model data will be very interesting to review tonight....
Trying to get a good briefing this afternoon... the two big issues involve the risk of severe weather tomorrow night and Monday, and a big change to cold weather in about 6 days.
SEVERE WEATHER THREAT: Looks like we will have our main threat of severe weather from about midnight tomorrow night through 8:00 a.m. Monday. Can't rule out an isolated tornado, but large hail and strong straight line winds would seem to be the main threat here. These storms will be ahead of a pre-frontal trough. The actual front comes in early Monday afternoon, and I guess some additional development is possible on the front; we will have to watch for that.
Best chance of organized severe storms during the pre-dawn hours Monday seems to be north of I-85 and east of I-65.
We note the new 18Z NAM only shows 0.07" of rain for Birmingham.
COLD WEATHER RETURNS: I am sure this will generate some nasty e-mail, but I just can't see how we have highs in the 50s and lows in the 30s at the end of the week. Even my old nemesis, the GFS MOS, has a high of 39 degrees in Birmingham on Friday. I can't disagree with that. The cold will be especially stinging after the recent mild snap. For the 50s/30s lovers, hold off on the hate mail until a week from now... we will see who is right then!
COVERAGE: What a clash... a severe weather threat on the biggest football day of the year. ABC 33/40 is pretty much wall to wall football Monday, including the Auburn game at noon. Thankfully, it looks like the severe weather threat will be well to the east of here by football time. If by chance something does come up during the afternoon, we will be using our new live Internet stream plus the "dot twos"... 33.2 and 40.2 on the digital side. If we have tornado warnings we will have a small box open on the main signal. We will take the weather coverage full screen if we indeed have a real tornado emergency. But, with today's technology we can air both football and severe weather coverage at the same time.
And, once again, it is very unlikely we will have a conflict anyway if our current thinking is correct.
RADAR: Our radar system atop Double Oak mountain developed a problem last week... I am not sure we can have the problem resolved in time for the storms tomorrow night. With the holiday/vacation situation we are running on a skeleton staff on the engineering side. So... the static images on the web site are not available right now. However, you can use our new live stream to watch the NEXRAD images anytime. There is a big link on the front page of the ABC 33/40 site:
http://www.abc3340.com/weather/
When you bring up the video window, you can move your mouse over the video and see two icons which give you the option to bring up the video in a Real Player window, which allows you to size the video anyway you want, or a full screen "theatre" option.
We will have plenty of updates here as the event gets closer... the 00Z model data will be very interesting to review tonight....
(I can;t wait to see how this works - it has a light and text on it and John T - you were right - that sucker is LOUD!
on December 31, 2005, 7:07 pm
Reply to this comment