Official National Weather Service forecasts for the Shoals — five counties on the Tennessee River in Alabama's northwest corner, from Florence, Muscle Shoals, Sheffield and Tuscumbia south through Russellville and Haleyville to Winfield.
Every Alabama region shares one system — the same maps, the same live radar, the same climate record. The Shoals sits on the Tennessee River where north Alabama flattens out, and that open ground is the problem: the springtime supercells come out of Mississippi with nothing to break them up, and April 27, 2011 tracked across these counties among the worst of that day. Winter here is the ice line more often than the snow line.