A Frightening Day for the State of Alabama! (credit: This Day in Weather History)

DISCUSSION: As we look all the way back to March 1st, 2007, many across the Southeast are reminded of an incredibly terrifying day.  On this day, a low pressure system was moving across several states located in the north-central United States.  Due to the position of this low pressure system, there was a favorable position for the warm front sector as it was positioned across a large majority of the southeastern United States.  Thus, the positioning of this warm sector allowed for a plethora of warm, moist air to move across the southeastern U.S.  As this occurred through overnight hours and continued right through the early-to-mid morning hours of March 1st, this generated an increasingly more conducive environment for the development of severe thunderstorms with particularly strong updrafts.  Moreover, the presence of a change in both the speed and direction of regional winds with increasing height also facilitated the presence of what is referred to as vertical wind shear (i.e., with respect to both wind speed and wind direction).  

​This combination combined to generate a regional vertical wind profile which rotated clockwise with height with allowed for the updrafts within the most intense thunderstorms to develop rotation.  Thus, the combination of warm, moist air (and high levels of convective instability) as well as rotating updrafts led to the development of supercell thunderstorms capable of producing large, long-tracked, and very destructive tornadoes.  Therefore, as noted above for this one particular supercell thunderstorm (and which also occurred with many other supercell thunderstorms on this particular day), many communities experienced terrible destruction and heartbreak as these violent storms moved through on that first day of March back in 2007.  To read more about this tornado and the entire day as a whole, feel free to click any of following links (Link 1, Link 2, Link 3, and Link 4).

To learn more about other past historic weather events occurring around the world, be sure to click here!

©2017 Meteorologist Jordan Rabinowitz