No. You're misunderstanding me. At 4:50 CDT (5:50 EDT the time of the crash) there is not a severe storm to be seen in the Birmingham area.
See for yourself. On your weather map, click radar only run the loop the the entire morning of the 14th.
When you back away, what you will see, from a lot of radar reporting stations in that area, is temperature inversion. That is because a cold front pushed through the Birmingham area the day before.
What is a temperature inversion?
A temperature inversion is a thin layer of the atmosphere where the normal decrease in temperature with height switches to the temperature increasing with height. An inversion acts like a lid, keeping normal convective overturning of the atmosphere from penetrating through the inversion.
This can cause several weather-related effects. One is the trapping of pollutants below the inversion, allowing them to build up. If the sky is very hazy, or is sunsets are very red, there is likely an inversion somewhere in the lower atmosphere. This happens more frequently in high pressure zones, where the gradual sinking of air in the high pressure dome typically causes an inversion to form at the base of a sinking layer of air.
Another effect that an inversion has is to make clouds just below the inversion to spread out and take on a flattened appearance.
Still another effect is to prevent thunderstorms from forming. Even in an air mass that is hot and humid in the lowest layers, thunderstorms will be prevented if an inversion in the lower atmosphere is keeping this air from rising. The conceptual opposite of a temperature inversion is an unstable air layer.
So.... severe weather had nothing to do with this crash. I'm sorry, but you're just wrong if you think so.
I'll stick with the airline captain with 43 years of experience who obviously looked at the weather at the time of the crash (before opening his mouth and putting his reputation on the line).
This will be my last post on the subject for now.
The black boxes should tell us more.
Good discussion.
Peace Out.