Hazardous weather will continue today with storms, damaging wind
Hazardous weather with possible tornadoes, hail and damaging winds will move into the Madison and Huntsville area for the second time this week today, forecasters said, and all local public schools and colleges moved to online instruction or canceled classes in preparation.
Katie Magee, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Huntsville, said the trend with the storm has been pushing back its arrival time so it is possible it will come through later. She said it is a rapidly evolving system that is expected to bring high winds.
“We have what’s called a high wind warning in effect and that’s going to be from 6 a.m. (today) to 6 p.m. (today),” Magee said.
Chelly Amin, another NWS meteorologist, said today will be the windiest day the area has seen so far this year and the winds could be damaging.
“Severe winds are 60 mph so you may have gusts up to 70 in some of the thunderstorms,” she said. “It won’t take much to officially become severe whenever that line of storms gets here.”
Amin said the wind will be the most severe part of the storm.
“We have the threat for damaging winds, that’s a biggie, and then we do have the potential for tornadoes and hail,” she said. “But the damaging wind threat far outweighs anything else that we’re probably going to see (today).”
The weather service said the storm will bring only about a quarter-inch of additional rain. Magee said a flood watch for today was canceled.
“This line of storms is going to be moving so quickly we don’t expect any issues with flooding,” she said. “It will be very intense rainfall but it’s not going to be persistent hours of rainfall like we had (Wednesday night). That’s going to be the main difference; this is going to move very rapidly from west to east across our area.”
Amin said there is the potential for tornadoes and quarter-size or larger hail. The greatest threat is the damaging winds.
“The trees are kind of weakened from that really cold snap in December so it’s not taking very much to blow some limbs down, knock some power out,” she said. “That’s pretty common in these situations.”
