Several rounds of showers and thunderstorms will be the theme of today's forecast.
The first round of rain and thunderstorms is just moving onshore for areas generally South of Muskegon and will pose a locally heavy rainfall and some lightning risk. Severe weather is not expected with this line and there are no real areas of concern on Doppler Radar at of 5:15 AM this morning.
We should see this activity clear the I-69 corridor by 9:00 or 10:00 AM and the US-127 corridor by Noon. This clearing will allow for at least some atmospheric recovery/destabilization before our second round of showers and storms develops this afternoon.
Still a fair amount of uncertainty with this and computer weather models are having a hard time nailing down where additional convective activity may develop this afternoon. 00z (8:00 PM yesterday)'s HRRR run showed additional strong to severe storms developing along the US-131 corridor from Traverse City South all the way through Three Rivers. 06z (2:00 AM today)'s HRRR suggests that additional strong to severe storm development will occur but will remain largely North of the I-96 corridor with the greatest threat posed to areas like Mount Pleasant. 00z NAM run suggests very isolated new storm development across the state this afternoon while the 06z NAM run suggests no renewed storm development. The point is, that we still don't have a ton of confidence in the forecast and it's really going to come down to what we call "now-casting" and relying on surface observations, later model runs, and Doppler radar trends through the day today to get a real accurate forecast. One thing especially of note, and we saw this occur just 10 days ago on the morning of August 6th; is that the SPC does not have a tornado risk outlined for any part of Lower Michigan in their latest Day 1 Severe Weather Outlook (shown above) but Michigan can do crazy things when we get the right interactions from any localized atmospheric elements such as Lake Breeze Boundaries. While not immediately likely, a brief tornado can't be entirely ruled out in our humble/non-professional opinion. This is based on the low-level curvature of model wind profiles and modest CAPE/Bulk Shear profiles this afternoon and evening.
A third round of showers and storms very late this evening (after 9:00 PM) will move off the Lake into Western Lower Michigan and could pose a locally heavy rain, lightning, and perhaps a very low chance of an isolated damaging wind gust depending on how the afternoon environment is used by any potential new storm development as discussed above.
Here is our forecasted storm timing map for today. The hatched circles indicate any potential severe weather risk from the third round of storms (after 9:00 PM or so) whereas the filled color circles (areas 1 & 2) indicate the afternoon threat.
We'll provide updates through the day today via social media and we may activate chase mode later this afternoon/evening depending on trends. Stay tuned to our social platforms (especially Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube) to get the latest from us!
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