Francine flooding rain severe storms & tornadoes rip inland Louisiana Mississippi north to Tennessee

Photo byNational Weather Service

Hurricane Francine with 90 mph winds will be making landfall along the coast of Louisiana today and it will spread a large area of heavy flooding rains and severe thunderstorm including elevated tornado risk northward. Once inland Francine will track northward basically following the Mississippi River to Northeast Arkansas and Western Tennessee and that brings adverse weather over a large portion of the Central Gulf States and the Middle Mississippi Valley. This will inclde Mississippi, Western Alabama, Western Tennesee & Kentucky, Eastern Arkansas, Southern Missouri and Southern Illinois.

Photo bystorm prediction center

Areas along the Gulf Coast from Louisiana will be dealing with severe thunderstorms and elevated tornado risk per the Storm Prediction Center Forecast. I would expect to see tornadoes spinning up in this zone. Also we have the issue of flash flooding and heavy rain. 6 inches or more of rain is forecast for a large area from Southeast Louisiana northward through Mississippi and eastward along the Alabama coast and the Florida Panhandle.

Photo byweather prediction center

The track and future of Francine will be an interesting one. Blocking high pressure will allow Francine to move only so far north as it weakens. Global models are forecasting the energy from Francine to shift southeastward to off the Southeast Coast of the US over this coming weekend.

Photo byTropical Tidbits

This likely will force low pressure to redevelop off the Southeast US coast over the weekend and then head northwestward into the Carolinas! Tropical systems are known to do strange things sometimes and given the set up in the upper atmosphere across the US, this idea is not as far fetched as it seems. You can expect showery rains and heavy downpours to be an issue across the South and Southeast US for the rest of the week and into the weekend. You can also expect thunderstorm and tornado risk to continue across Alabama and the Florida Panhandle Thursday into Friday. We will be monitoring this system carefully over the next several days.