Plateau, AL Weather

Key Messages

Issued at 605 PM CDT Thu Oct 22 2026

- Moderate to strong northeast winds will create hazardous conditions for small craft over most of the marine area Friday night continuing into early next week.

- A High Risk of rip currents is expected for beach areas from Saturday through Monday night.

Update

Issued at 605 PM CDT Thu Oct 22 2026

Current forecast on track this evening, with no updates planned at this time. /16

Discussion

Issued at 323 PM CDT Thu Oct 22 2026

Starting out late this morning rather quiet yet again. GOES-16 Satellite illustrates completely clear skies across the southeastern US dominated by a large surface high anchored over the great lakes, promoting upper-level subsidence across nearly the entire central and eastern US. Upper-level maps highlight the attendant deep/high amplitude ridge over the central US, with a dry mid/upper-level impulse diving south into the central Gulf as indicated by a pocket of colder H5 temperatures aloft and associated PVA which, given how dry the tropospheric profile is, only has a few clouds and shower/storms over the central Gulf. Atmospheric PW's in the 0.5-0.65 inch range per GOES-16 derived precipitable water product falls at or below the 10th percentile for this time of the year highlighting how anomalously dry this airmass is.

Having said all of that, for today, only main adjustments were focused on dewpoints and minimum temperatures following along recent trends. Starting with dewpoints, a deep PBL mixing regime setting up later this afternoon will again drop dewpoints below NBM deterministic suggested values. Verification from yesterday (area mean dewpoints) placed RTMA/observed dewpoints closest to verify with the NBM05th percentile. Impressive but not uncommon in anomalously dry airmasses like this. Went ahead with a 05th percentile blend for this afternoon mainly, and again into each afternoon into the weekend. This places minimum RH's this afternoon in the 30-40% range, but drops some going into Friday and Saturday as we get a reinforcing shot of drier air spilling in from the northeast following the surface high diving south across the eastern US, compacting pressure gradient which in turn increases the winds. Fire weather concerns may need to be closely monitored, mainly for western areas Saturday and Sunday. Meanwhile for areas east, concerns remain for those still burning tree debris left over from Hurricane Isaias - With breezy winds and even though RH's are not exactly in criteria, wanted to stress those to use extreme caution and take safety precautions when burning.

As for overnight lows, made slight lowering adjustments each morning. The NBM Deterministic bias has attempted to try to catch up to the past several days cold bias, with the deterministic now even below the lowest percentile member (5th percentile). Again, impressive but reflects the extreme warm bias in short-range models. Given verification trends, went deterministic since it was the coldest values through the next 3 mornings but dipped it a couple degrees even lower. Didn't want to overshoot too far as percentile spread this extreme yields lower confidence, but wanted to keep trends in the right direction.

As previously mentioned, the reinforcing shot of drier air and tightening pressure gradient winds over the weekend will bring back breezy ENE winds. Highs will drop several degrees Saturday and it'll feel cooler/drier but again, overall, very little impacts other than exercising extreme caution if planning to do any burning. Again will closely monitor the degree of the dry air and winds across the swath that experienced extreme tree damage and will continue to stress caution if burning.

Beyond this weekend into next week, diving into cluster analysis and long-range trends, looking relatively deamplified across the US into a quasi-zonal H5 pattern. Few low amplitude shortwave impulses riding the flow could introduce partly cloudy skies around mid-week, but appears mainly dry. Long-range ensembles per cluster analysis is in relatively good agreement overall with no extreme swings. Some minor decrepancies between the potential in PacNW or west coast troughing, that would eventually trickle downstream to our area beyond 7 days. Swing solutions here vary, as ofcourse, deeper troughing could eject disturbances over the Mexican Plateau into the central/southern MS valley region introducing the potential for storms going into the first week of November. Definitely too early to narrow down specifics but will

Aviation

(00Z TAFS) Issued at 605 PM CDT Thu Oct 22 2026

General VFR conditions expected through the forecast. Light winds overnight transition to easterly 5 to 10 knots Friday morning. /16