ALABAMA FOR LIBERTY issued the following announcement on July 20.
Huntsville and Muscle Shoals both hit 95ºF Monday afternoon, but the heat index was as high as 109ºF at Northwest Alabama Regional Airport at 3 PM! Scattered thunderstorms cooled it down and dumped some tremendous rain on a few spots, but mid-summer weather like this never gives you a guarantee that you will get that rain or that you won’t.
We’ll have more of the same on Tuesday: highs in the 90s, heat index around 100ºF to 105ºF, and more scattered, hit-or-miss, unevenly-distributed, locally-heavy thunderstorms capable of dropping more than an inch of rain and generating a lot of lightning.
Track heavy storms with WHNT.com’s Interactive Radar or swipe over to the radar feature on Live Alert 19! You can also get up-to-date, location-based alerts wherever you are on Live Alert 19. Download it today for iOS and Android.
These downpours are not exactly ‘random.’ There’s a reason a thunderstorm develops in a particular spot; however, it’s next to impossible to see those reasons hours or days in advance this time of year. When the forecast calls for “scattered” or “spotty” or any of the terms we use to describe storms this time of year, there’s some uncertainty built into it:We know we’re in an environment where storms will develop, but can’t see the nitty-gritty details until the storms are already in progress.
We can’t know those little details because we cannot perfectly model atmospheric conditions at any given time. It’s tiny differences in temperature and pressure that cause these summer ‘pop-ups’ to behave like bubbles in a boiling pot. You know they’ll be there, but there’s so much chaotic behavior in the water that it’s hard to pinpoint how a single bubble will behave.
Original source here.
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