There's a lot of chatter beginning to surround a potential high-impact storm system that is forecast to track from the Southern Plains to the Great Lakes to the Northeast next week. On the north side we'll watch for the first heavy snow of the season across portions of the Midwest and Great Lakes, but the warm sector of the storm may bring the potential for severe thunderstorms to the Southern U.S.
On Friday morning the Storm Prediction Center has highlighted portions of the Gulf Coast and Southeast U.S. in their Days 4-8 Outlook for next Monday & Tuesday, January 8-9.
Here's what they have to say as we head into the weekend:
In the wake of a prior intrusion of cold/dry air, boundary-layer
recovery across the northwestern Gulf of Mexico may be slow to
contribute to destabilization inland of coastal areas.
Additionally, there has been a signal in model output that
considerable warm advection driven convection near or offshore of north central Gulf coastal areas may further impede, or at least
slow, inland moisture return. However, in response to the more
rapid deepening of the surface cyclone, it appears that an
increasingly moist warm sector boundary-layer will spread inland
across the Gulf Coast, near/east of the Mississippi River by late Monday night, before surging east-northeastward through portions of the eastern Gulf and southern Atlantic coast states on Tuesday.
Coincident with intensifying deep-layer wind fields and shear,
including potentially large clockwise curved low-level hodographs,
the environment may become conducive to considerable organized
severe thunderstorm development, including supercells, with
potential to produce damaging wind gusts and a few strong tornadoes.