7/06/07 Soddy Daisy Lightning Video and our Friday/Weekend Rain

Check out this severe weather video submitted to us by a viewer in Soddy Daisy from earlier this week.  Thanks Lacy Elrod! Send your short weather video to bsmith@wdef.com 

The hopes of a good soaker from that Texas storm are still in question with indications it may be just south of us. Yesterday’s 5-day rainfall totals from the Hydrological Prediction Center were downright impressive for North Alabama, Southern TN and North GA. Not as much today, but still promising.

Storms are expected to blossom today helping to fight our drought. A bit of good news though, as the exceptional D-4 Drought conditions seem to be loosing its stranglehold in our viewing area. This is due to the showers and storms we had last week. We are still in a Severe Drought classification, which is one notch below. Portions of Jackson and Dekalb are still worse off. The latest U.S. Drought Monitor.

Our Futurecast for this afternoon is painting storms on the map as a front and moisture from the west move through. With daytime heating and moderate available moisture, scattered storms will develop late this morning and afternoon. We have been able to heat up quickly creating an unstable atmosphere, which could lead to a few stronger storms. Damaging Winds would be the main threat. It appears western portions of the viewing area may see more activity due to a convective zone(better lift) setting up from north to south in Middle TN and NE Alabama.

The Futurecast on Saturday is agreeing with its earlier, much wetter prediction for Saturday afternoon from early morning runs. Other forecast models are disagreeing keeping the rain to the south. I want to take the middle and keep the heaviest rain in North GA and North AL closer to the front and the upper lever energy. I would not be surprised in a jog north with the rain tomorrow afternoon as cold fronts historically have a tough time pushing south of the TN Valley.

Rainfall totals are very difficult in a forecast like this and will vary depending on the setup of tomorrow’s rain and the isloated heavy rainfall amounts from today's storms.

The WRF model below wants to move more rain back in on Sunday and is the outlier at this point. With the front “hanging around” through the weekend, afternoon storms on Sunday are still possible. If all the rain comes our way, we could easily see a couple inches in some locations through the weekend, especially south.

See you soon,

Brian