It looks like there will be another round of storms and the possibility of severe weather will show up Sunday night for South Mississippi. The Storm Prediction Center currently has the area under a Marginal-to-Slight Risk for severe weather.
This is in response the computer weather models showing a line of showers and storms pushing through the area between 11pm Sunday night and 5am Monday morning. And then the chance for storms may linger through part of the day on Monday.
Models are starting to come into better agreement on the timing and the intensity of the storms late Sunday and into Monday.
The Good news
It looks like the tornado threat will be reasonably lower during the overnight hours as the line of storms arrives. The hodographs won’t be long or arched and the wind profile is generally unidirectional through the lower five kilometers of the atmosphere.
The Bad News
Since the flow is in the same direction as the storm orientation, should the line hold together, we may end up with training storms dropping a lot of rain over the same locations. With PWAT values up around 1.50″ to 1.75″ that means storms will be pretty proficient rain producers. Localized flooding may become a concern.
What’s the haps?
With this next system there will be a few things not lined up to give the area a true threat for severe storms. There is (1) the orientation of the front to the mean atmospheric flow, (2) the forcing isn’t lined up with the severe weather parameters, and (3) the storms will be moving through during the most stable part of the day – around sunrise.
You can see that in the forecast sounding data pretty clearly.
The from and the wind field is nearly unidirectional from the surface to 600mb. And the Omega values are in the blue (less forcing) while the the severe weather parameters are highest. Plus the data shows that all of this gets messier as time moves toward sunrise.
What does this mean?
It means that severe weather is possible, but not a slam dunk. And any weather that does develop will most likely be heavy rain, frequent lightning, wind gusts up to 70mph and small hail. The tornado threat will be pretty minimal south of I-20 during this time period.
All of these threats may change as we head through the morning on Monday and into the afternoon. However at this time, it is too early to make projections on specifics at that point.
