Kevin Myatt is The Roanoke Times' weather columnist.

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• Coldest morning of winter so far likely across much of Southwest Virginia; Tuesday precipitation looking doubtful
• UPDATE 8:45 AM, 2/11: Blustery winds for all, snowflakes for most, white ground for many, multiple inches for few
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(Gasp.) I regret not seeing "The Perfect Storm" on the big screen, but I did read Sebastian Junger's enthralling book long before the movie came out. I have no such qualms about missing "Twister." With hundreds and hundreds of videos of real tornadoes available, (and having seen six with my own eyes), who needs special effects and hokey story lines?

Months ago in one of my rare cinematic ventures, maybe before "The Passion" or "Hidalgo," I saw a preview for a movie featuring tornadoes shredding Los Angeles and a glacier encasing Manhattan. I knew that to keep my weather columnist credentials fresh, I should see it and offer my perspective on it.

There are many quirky things about the "Day After Tomorrow" that have nothing to do with weather that I could get sidetracked on, such as the vice president character being a thinly veiled Dick Cheney, that the only song I can recall from the whole movie is Culture Club's "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?" and what's with that pack of wolves on the ship?

But I'm a weather columnist, not a movie reviewer, so I'll stick to my turf.

The "Day After Tomorrow" is more fiction than science. Whatever may or may not be happening with global warming, whatever may or may not have triggered the last ice age, the idea that three southward-moving, continent-sized, hurricane-shaped storms could flash-freeze most of the Northern Hemisphere is far-fetched, at best.

The mechanism producing the flash-freeze, an "eye" sucking super-cold air from the upper troposphere to Earth's surface, is meteorologically problematic. The center of such a low-pressure area would lift air upward at its core, not pull it downward.

A more believable scenario would be some kind of super-massive high-pressure dome mercilessly pressing cold air toward the surface - a big version of the way our real-life Arctic air outbreaks occur.

It would make far less interesting cinema, though, because the high would produce extremely dry weather, not twisters on Sunset Boulevard or bowling-ball-sized hail in Tokyo. About the most exciting thing that would happen would be that you might have enough static cling in your house to suspend your pets on the ceiling.

As for the broader concept, that global warming could cause a big chill, there are some kernels of truth, at least theoretically.

It is conceivable that fresh water from melting icecaps could divert sea currents that bring heat north from the tropics. It is possible that a warmer planet could allow more precipitation to fall in the high latitudes of Canada and Eurasia, which could in time build a thicker ice layer there, because even slightly warmer temperatures would still be below freezing much of the year. It is also possible that increased heating would cause more evaporation, increasing worldwide cloud cover, thereby blocking out some of the Earth-warming sunlight.

But all of this is speculative. That's why, for now at least, it's Hollywood.

Soaking rains

Regrettably, the tropical rains we talked about Monday turned deadly early Wednesday with two fatalities in Henry County, where there was severe flash flooding.

The direct tropical connection is diminishing a bit, but the combination of hotter temperatures, leftover humidity and occasional dalliances with fronts trying to punch through will put us in an unsettled, occasionally stormy pattern through at least the middle of next week.

Like a soaked sponge, once the moisture is this thick in our atmosphere, it's going to take a lot of wringing to get it all out. Our summer could be a humid, showery one.