Another day, more rain and thunderstorms in the forecast. The NWS Storm Prediction Center maintains a Level 2 of 5 risk of severe storms across the entire area for today, with the main timeframe we’re watching being the late morning through the afternoon. Overall, this is a very low-end risk. Showers and storms will be fairly widespread today, but most of you will only be looking at heavy rain, frequent lightning, and maybe pea size hail or 30-40 mph wind gusts. There’s only a low chance of a couple of storms getting strong enough to warrant a severe thunderstorm warning for 60 mph winds or quarter size hail. The tornado threat today is extremely low, but it’s not completely zero. It’s never all the way zero at any point there is a severe thunderstorm around. We’re just not expecting tornadoes to be a problem today. Atmospheric conditions don’t favor them. It’s just that a small, brief lower-end one isn’t 100% impossible to happen.
The Baron high-resolution “Futurecast” model above does a good job of breaking down the overall basic timeline evolution for today’s rain and storms. We start to see activity moving in from our southwest by late morning and midday. Threat spreads northeast across southern middle Tennessee and north Alabama through the afternoon with heavy rainfall, lightning, gusty winds, and isolated small hail. Behind that initial wave, we may see a few more scattered strong storms into the mid to late afternoon before things taper off and shift to our east by the evening.
Overall, we can’t rule out a couple of stronger storms embedded within the more widespread rain and general thunderstorms. We just aren’t expecting significant problems with severe storms today!
