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About Kevin

Kevin Myatt grew up in Arkansas to the tune of tornado sirens and the rhythm of hailstones, aspiring to be a meteorologist before his studies and career were turned to journalism instead. Though he often chases storms, he prefers living in the cooler, more tranquil weather of the Blue Ridge. He moved to Roanoke in 1999 to take a job on the copy desk of The Roanoke Times; writing headlines and editing copy is his principal work for the newspaper today.

Each May, Kevin assists Pulaski County High School / Virginia Tech meteorology instructor Dave Carroll in leading college and high school students to the Plains to observe severe weather firsthand. The accounts of many of his storm chases can be found here on the storm chasing page of his weather blog on roanoke.com.

Kevin was an editor for "Hurricanes and the Middle Atlantic States," a book written by D.C.-area weather enthusiast Rick Schwartz and published by Blue Diamond Books that documents hurricanes striking the mid-Atlantic states since colonial times.

The Weather Journal column began in 2003 and appears on Friday's Virginia section front in The Roanoke Times. The Weather Journal blog began in 2006 and follows weather day-by-day between the larger columns.

Beauty of storm belies its danger

BROWNWOOD, Texas -- Twice in 10 days before heading out on the annual May storm chasing trip, I watched as a seemingly perfect supercell thunderstorm took shape on radar.

Each time, the storm developed all the characteristics we would be looking for in a storm to follow closely out here in the Plains states.

There was a part of me that wanted to be just southeast of where a hook was developing, watching the rotating lowering that was almost certainly developing, marked by radar indication of rotating winds from the surface high into the cloud.

But each of the storms was approaching my parents' home in northeast Arkansas, and all I could do was watch with a sick feeling in my stomach, praying that my parents and my hometown would not be hit by a tornado.

Thankfully, they weren't, but highly visible tornadoes developed with each storm, on May 2 and Saturday, in more rural areas a few miles from where my parents live. No one was killed or injured, and no homes were destroyed in either storm.

I breathed a sigh of relief that neither my parents nor my hometown had suffered, fully realizing that other tornadoes on each of those days wreaked death and destruction elsewhere. But I also felt a twinge of longing to have been visiting on those days so I could find somewhere to view the storm.

Such is the strange conflict weather enthusiasts, particularly storm chasers, constantly face: desire to witness meteorological fury, while also fearing what that fury can do, especially as it can affect people and places they hold dear.

It's probably why I developed a trembling fear of storms when I was in elementary school, because I had read extensively at an early age about what tornadoes could do. Somehow, with adolescence, that morphed into a desire to observe severe storms.

Sandy LaCorte, who is the student leader for our 12-member group composed primarily of college and high school students, faced the dichotomy head-on twice in four days.

During her graduation week from the University of North Carolina, Asheville, a roommate's parents were at home when it was heavily damaged by a tornado in Clemmons, N.C., just southwest of Winston-Salem.

Having looked forward to her second consecutive trip with us for months, she said her roommate's family's suffering gave her a new perspective on why she wanted to learn about tornadoes, and apply that learning to her career as a meteorologist.

On the road west on Sunday, she watched on radar as a storm approached her own parents' home near Charlotte. She called family and friends, warning them of the storm that was approaching.

As had been the case with me two days earlier, the storm tracked just south of where her parents lived.

During the four years I have been part of this trip, we have seen at least four tornadoes, but none of them has damaged anything made by human hands.

Most of the storms we see are, more than anything else, just pretty.

That was certainly true on Tuesday and Wednesday, as we watched supercell thunderstorms strut their hour upon the stage over dramatic terrain -- forested ridges of north-central Texas on Tuesday, and the red-rock mesas of western Texas on Wednesday.

We saw lowered cloud bases rotating, just a step or two before the stage that they might produce a tornado. We saw amazing storm structures rarely visible in the eastern United States.

Both times, we were positioned exactly where we wanted to be, just southeast of a developing hook on radar.

And yet, though these storms did little or no damage, someone else was probably viewing the radar with dread, worried about a family or a town that could be in reach of the hook.