I can confidently say this will be the last event for 2020 or the first for 2021. I do think with things trending slower it will lesson the threat in central Alabama due to timing. Whether we see convection or not at the coast, looks likes a frustrating squall line with a few embedded tornadoes. Hopefully this system doesn’t speed up and it comes in the afternoon. Models should get more consistent in the next 24-36 hours
We're in the time of the year where daytime heating usually matters very little to severe weather threats in the overall scheme of things, especially one that would have a mainly cloudy warm sector. Destabilization would happen by advection instead of insolation, and that would occur to the same degree, whether it is day or night. A slower timing would actually allow for more moisture advection farther northward, increasing the degree of instability and how far north it extends. Very VERY few severe weather threats in the winter months are modulated much by daytime heating, despite how you may hear otherwise ahead of a system by people who apply anecdotal "classic" rules that are based on April-May systems in the Plains. Real, actual systems in Dixie repeatedly say differently. If that wasn't the case, a good 85-90% of our severe weather events here in the winter months wouldn't even happen at all. When we get to 70+ in a warm sector in December-February, it is usually because of strong warm air advection, not several hours of sun breaks. In the few times that is not the case and we have decent insolation too with a severe threat during this time of the year, we are usually slapped with a higher-end event... either a full-blown tornado outbreak or a "storm-of-the-day" event that produces a violent tornado.
Having said all that, I'm still leaning toward this being a case, with how sharply southeast the low-level winds are until right at the last minute... that this is another one of those events with widespread rain north of the warm front that falls into cooler, more stable air advecting in from Georgia... and that reinforces the warm front and keeps it locked down south. The current SLGT comes up almost to Tuscaloosa, but I see this being a situation where the higher threat may stay south of Demopolis, Selma, and Montgomery. The exact same thing happened with the Christmas Day 2012 and Feb. 23, 2016 systems, the two events that this setup almost carbon-copy analogs to. But those were also high-end outbreaks down south, at least by coastal standards. Both had multiple long-tracked, strong tornadoes, and both would've verified a High Risk. This may end up being a substantial supercell-flavored tornado threat for southeast Louisiana, south Mississippi, into southwest Alabama, and maybe the far western Florida panhandle. I think we eventually go ENH Risk down there, and I wouldn't be shocked if there's an eventual upgrade to MDT.
