Widespread showers moved through the Tennessee Valley Wednesday, dropping as much as 0.35″ of rain at the Huntsville International Airport, and 0.83″ at the Northwest Alabama Regional Airport in Muscle Shoals.

More showers are possible Thursday, though remaining more spotty in nature.

Some heavy downpours develop through early Thursday morning: mainly just locally-heavy rain with occasional lightning and thunder. Morning lows will stay in the upper 60s to low 70s under a mostly cloudy sky.

Storm clouds build up ahead of a weak disturbance that kicks off a few more scattered, unevenly-spread thunderstorms through Thursday afternoon and evening. Expect highs in the middle/upper 80s with a southwest breeze up to 15 miles per hour Thursday.

Track the rain and storms with WHNT.com’s Interactive Radar or swipe over to the radar feature on Live Alert 19! You can also get up-to-date, location-based alerts wherever you are on Live Alert 19. Download it today for iOS and Android.

Friday: thunderstorm chaos?

A ‘rain chance’ might be the most poorly understood and poorly communicated aspect of a weather forecast.

Friday’s chance of at least 0.10″ of rainfall? That’s around 40-50%. What does that really mean, though?

Your probability of precipitation (‘POP’) is a chance of a specific amount of rain in a specific window of time. It’s not the percent of the ‘area’ getting rain; it’s a probability like the odds of winning the lottery or the odds of winning a football game. In both cases, the odds are usually pretty solid toward either winning or losing; now and then, it’s a toss-up.

That’s what Friday stacks up to be around here: a toss-up between getting nothing at all and getting a whopper of a storm. Why? It’s summertime thunderstorm chaos:

A cluster of storms over Tennessee and North Alabama Friday starts out small, and as those storms collapse, new ones develop on their outflow (which acts like a small cool front). Since the storms rise and fall without the steering of a ‘storm system,’ you end up with some getting 1-2″ of rainfall and others getting practically nothing.

More isolated to scattered storms are in the forecast this weekend, similar to the Thursday and Friday pattern.