Looking back to past snowstorms in Alabama – Valley Times -News

With the safe time for the winter time behind us, the meteorologist of the National Meteorological Service in Birmingham, Chris Danden, says warmer weather is coming.

Darden told the Valley Times-News that higher Friday temperatures will continue through the weekend until the beginning of next week. By Tuesday, the peaks will recover back in the 40th and 50s with low levels in the 20th and 30s.

Rainfall can make the roads smooth on Sunday nights and Monday morning, but nothing as extreme as the hidden sheets of ice attacking unsuspecting drivers on Tuesday and Wednesday this week.

Frost may have melted, but for many in the area of ​​the valley, the glacier freezing in the last few days has caused memories of the former snowy days.

More recently, all Alabama, but in particular the northern parts, faced the harsh week of winter in 2015. According to NWS low in rainfall.

However, the last winter storm of its kind to touch Central Alabama would return in 1985, during which the temperature of the Birmingham airport fell under the evening of January 19.

With the onset of the night, the temperatures continued to immerse themselves in the teenagers, falling to seven degrees by 9am on the 20th. The colds have never passed the single numbers throughout the day. Until the night, Birmingham endured an Arctic wind.

The lowest temperature registered that night was six degrees below zero.

The next day, the tall was only 17 degrees. The older population of Chambers County will not forget the bitter cold of this January.

Nearly ten years in the early central Alabama, it was greeted with such a frozen cold that it was snowing all the way to Homestead, Florida, south of Miami.

According to NWS, snow waves were even recorded in the Bahamas that year.

The whole month of January was constantly cold in Birmingham with only five days, in which the temperature reached 50 degrees or high. Whereas the thermometer refused to climb over freezing seven days of the month.

At 24 from 31 days to January, the low temperature reached freezing or below, and at 14 of them the low was in teenagers and one -digit.

This January in 1977, the most cold time reached the top of the 15th and lasted until the 20th. The temperature is covered at or at freezing for 110 consecutive days, which was the second longest such period in the recorded history of Birmingham.

The two days with the lowest temperature were 17th and the 19th, “when the morning low levels were out three degrees above zero,” according to NWS.

In addition, the average high temperature of the month is 41.1 degrees, the average low temperature is 22.1 degrees, and the average daily temperature is 31.6 degrees.

This week, the storm, said Darden, was a combination of meteorological systems that meet and led to a unique reaction. First, the cold Arctic air mass, which was moving south of Canada, created very cold and very dry conditions.

Then another system traveled through the North Mexican Bay and spread the moisture inside the interior, which made him snow along the coast of the Persian Gulf.

The reason, said Darden that central Alabama was avoiding the stronger inchs of snow that the mobile area received was that as the moisture spreads north, it lost speed.