I was an early fan of Kevin Myatt's Weather Journal and his blog on
roanoke.com.

Being a fellow weather geek myself, who as a kid drew his own weather maps of low-pressure systems plowing toward the Mid-Atlantic region, I loved reading Kevin's regular-guy takes about the weather and his ability to answer important climate questions such as "Are El Nino and La Nina married or are they brother and sister?"

I occasionally left goofy comments on his blog (maybe even the question above), but before long I was exposed as a weather-geek fraud.

Those weather maps I drew as a kid were inspired more by local TV news than by meteorology. The fans who soon populated Kevin's blog community were the real deal: amateur (and maybe even professional) meteorologists who got as excited about an approaching Alberta clipper as a kid watching Santa's reindeer on the local radar on Christmas Eve.

Soon, the blog chatter was all about North Atlantic Oscillations and negative phases over Greenland.

Basically, the group got too smart for me to have anything to do with it, which is not the first time that has happened . In fact, I believe Kevin and his crowd of weather watchers might be the smartest people in the world. Here is an actual sentence from one of Kevin's recent posts about today's snow smackdown:

"The driving force in this winter storm threat is a pocket of upper-level energy called a 'vort max,' (short for 'vorticity maximum' and often just called a 'vort') its position Wednesday morning projected on the 12Z GFS at left."

A "vort max!" Sounds like a villain from Middle Earth!

As winter winds down, we won't read as much about what the 12Z GFS or Euro model says about the chance of snow, but don't worry, spring tornado season will soon be here, and you will get the scoop on the weather blog faster than you can say "derecho."

Weather Journal

1 day ago