


Today was one of the mildest days we’ve had around the Tennessee Valley for over a week now! Most locations got into the mid to upper 50s for daytime highs, and the Muscle Shoals airport almost hit 60 degrees! Winds will go light to calm overnight, and with mostly clear skies, temperatures will drop into the upper 20s to lower 30s by the early morning hours. We could have some patchy areas of freezing fog, but we don’t expect any significant or widespread impacts. We start mostly sunny to partly cloudy Friday morning, but clouds roll in through the day ahead of our next weather system. We will be similarly warm, if not a couple degrees warmer, to what we were today… with daytime highs areawide in at least the upper 50s. A few folks over northwest Alabama could certainly briefly touch the lower 60s. Winds will be stiff out of the south to southwest, gusting as high as 20 to 25 mph at times in the afternoon.






Rain moves into the area after sunset, with localized heavy downpours during the overnight and into the early morning hours of Saturday. We can’t rule out a rumble of thunder, but there is no threat of severe storms. Showers continue into Saturday morning and midday. Temperatures get down to the low to mid 40s overnight before climbing back to the mid or upper 50s Saturday morning. However, by midday and the afternoon, the big arctic cold front moves in, and that drops temperatures into the 40s and then 30s during the afternoon and evening of Saturday. We’ll make it down into the mid 20s for overnight lows.




The best we can do is the lower 30s for Sunday for daytime highs, and then the bottom falls out going into early next week as a true arctic air mass originating from Siberia drops southward from Canada into much of the central and eastern United States, including the Deep South and Tennessee Valley. High temps the first part of next week will be well down into the 20s, with overnight lows in the low to mid 10s. We will likely have single digit (or lower) wind chills by Monday and Tuesday of next week. This will be a pipe-bursting type cold across the area, with temperatures at or below freezing from sometime either Saturday night or Sunday… all the way until during the daytime hours of Wednesday. The single digit and lower wind chills will also be down to a dangerous level for people exposed outdoors for any significant length of time, or for people without proper heating indoors. Be sure to also make sure pets are protected indoors and livestock have adequate food, water, and shelter.
And yes, the potential for wintry weather in the Deep South is still on the table for next week, but it is VERY uncertain with a large degree of back and forth disagreement in the model data. However, we have noted that the trend in at least today’s data is for things to try to shift south of our local area. We will watch closely still to see how that evolves, however, because there is time for that trend to reverse… and these systems sometimes have a tendency to trend back north to some degree as we get into closer time ranges. The big story next week, however, is the cold air that will be in place!


Looking into the extended range, even though temperatures do moderate a bit going into late next week, it’s very likely that we stay at least some degree of below average with temperatures all the way through the rest of January… and looking farther down the road, early peaks forward into at least early parts of February aren’t exactly looking warm either.