Tuesday Severe Weather Event

Tomorrow is going to be an interesting situation for the Southeast.  A large part of the U.S. is already experiencing some phenomenal winter weather from the Great Plains to the Midwest states.  Here is an image of all that is going on right now with watches and warnings. 

All the red stretching from the Chicago area all the way down to the Oklahoma City area are under a Blizzard Warning.  All of the pink that stretches from Massachusetts all the way down to New Mexico is Winter Storm Warning.  All of this is covering at least a third of the country.  Now this doesn't show the severe weather that I have been building up to.  The following image shows a convective outlook for tomorrow between 1200Z (6:00 am CST) Tuesday to 1200Z (6:00 am CST) Wednesday for the U.S. 

This shows that there is a slight risk of severe storms stretching from Houston, TX to Destin, FL and from Memphis, TN to the Gulf Coast.  This may seem very general at first, but this image can be broken down to express a better idea of what kind of weather the southern states could be experiencing with this next image.
 

This shows the probability of these storms to be severe.  15% isn't a lot, but when you spread it over a large area that is being shown with a good chance of thunderstorms covering the entire area it could amount to some storms being severe.  Keep in mind this is all a forecast and is likely to change in area coverage.  Here is the current scenario to show a point of view of how things are already set up. 
The stationary front in the Southern Great Plains along with the dry line will be moving towards the Southeast and grab a lot of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico.  Here is a forecast image of what the setup of this amazing weather event will look like at 1800Z (12:00 pm CST) Tuesday. 

It looks pretty messy which is expected out of a situation like this, but allow me to elaborate some.  Everything within the green lines is precipitation.  The symbols with a star, *, is snow; the symbol with the dot in the triangle is sleet; the symbol with the upside down triangle and a dot on top is a rain shower; and the other symbols that are ahead of the cold fronts that are hard to explain are thunderstorms.  The pink dash line indicates the freezing degree line where the temperatures behind it are below freezing and the temperatures ahead of it are above freezing.  Since I am mainly sticking to the southern states where the severe weather is, I will show forecasted rainfall amounts for 00Z Tuesday (6:00 pm CST Monday) to 00Z Wednesday (6:00 pm CST Tuesday). 
If you remember the area where the slight risk of severe weather is you can see that the amount of rainfall for the southern states will range from a half of an inch along the coast to as much as about 1.5 inches around Memphis, TN.  This is a lot of rain that will likely fall.  The final thing to talk about that is just as amazing as the precipitaion is the temperatures.  Here are the forecasted highs for the U.S. on Tuesday. 

The smooth green colors is the approximate location of the fronts.  Cold front is most likely going to stretch from south-central Texas into Arkansas and the warm front will likely stretch from northeastern Arkansas to eastern Kentucky with a stationary front curving down into northern Georgia and turning back into a warm front at the North Carolina/Virginia border.  Now with these really warm temps in the Southeast and the very cold temps pushing down into The Great Plains will create a powerful clash of warm air and cold air creating some strong to possible severe thunderstorms along the cold front.  Now look at the temps forecasted after the low pressure system pushes eastward. 

You can now see a lot of cold air covering about 70% of the country esp. behind the cold front.  This is the arctic air that was behind this low pressure system.  The frontal boundary that I mentioned before is now in Georgia and in the western portions of the Carolina's and does not have as strong of a temperature difference in such a short period of time as it did before and all the states, MS, LA and TX coast, are below freezing.  This just goes to show how impressive and how strong of a low pressure system this is.

This is just a general overview of what is likely to come for Tuesday into Wednesday.  As Wednesday begins to kick off I will update all the imformation as it starts to come in to keep everyone posted and up-to-date on what to lookout for.