April is arriving right on schedule tomorrow morning with a chance of some severe weather. I don’t think it will be a massive outbreak, but as we all know it only takes one tornado to screw up someone’s day…. There is a chance that some of these storms in the early morning hours, mainly from 5-8am in the metro area, could rotate and if there is enough instability we could see the chance of a few storms that could produce a small tornado or 2….
First of all, here is the watch that is in effect until 5am for all of the N Georgia area… It is early to call this, but we will most likely see this pushed east and extended till around 10am basically having all the metro area under a tornado watch through the mid-late morning hours…
The main thing that concerns me can be seen in this water vapor image right here… the bright white represent the very tall cloud tops, notice the SE and the area of tall clouds moving towards the NE and the area just to the south moving towards the East….. That is a very strong area of divergence that is forecasted to move over us at 5am…. you can see it here in the NAM version of the jet stream… So as this area moves over us it will help to enhance the line of storms that is moving through Alabama, here it is at 10pm…According to the high res nam this will move though the metro area tomorrow morning between 5 and 8am and when it does there will be some pretty high instability and some shear down at the surface… This is the sequence or 5 and 7 am instability and shear images… Notice the bullseye of shear right across the metro area at the same time the instability is high…
5am
7am
Here is the radar sequence…… 5am and 7am
So the line of storms moves through the metro area around 7am and with that line we will see severe weather I am certain. As for tornadoes, I am giving it as 3-4 on a scale of 1-10. If we do they will be brief and small. The main threat will be wind and hail as always, but in the morning I am a bit concerned since the instability and shear will be a bit higher than normal when storms roll through.
I’ll post an update in the morning around 5am if you are up.
By the way, if you are in need of a damn good real estate agent in the Atlanta area I’d love to help my fellow weather geeks. Send me an email to Mike@topnorthatlantahomes.com and I can help you out!