Kevin Myatt

Latest entries from the Weather Journal blog

• Weather Journal remains on break
• Coastal low prompts Southwest Virginia flooding
• Hurricane Ida: Something extraordinary may be happening

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.

Air masses to battle for winter's legacy

It's Pacific vs. Arctic for the championship of winter 2006-07.

The mild and moist flow of winds high in the atmosphere from the Pacific Ocean that dominated the first several weeks of winter will battle the dense dome of cold and dry Arctic air that has been in control since Jan. 17.

The battle starts Monday and Tuesday when the first punch of moisture from a Pacific-origin storm system slams into the gut of the cold air overhead. The result will likely be some heavy precipitation.

I wish I could be more specific than that, but this far out, it is such a close call that every conceivable possibility from mere rain to a severe snowstorm has materialized on computer forecast models. Most likely there will be some significant snow and ice in our region on Monday night or Tuesday.

A major reason computer and human forecasters are having such a hard time latching onto a forecast is that so many pieces to the puzzle are scattered across the Pacific. We really don't know the size and shape of all of them yet.

During the cold and mostly dry pattern of the past three weeks, a strong high-pressure system near the West Coast blocked most storm systems over the Pacific Ocean from moving into the United States.

That high is now weakening, so all these storm systems trapped behind the high are free to run loose across the United States. It's kind of like pulling open the gates for a horse race or at a dog track.

The problem is that there are so many of them, and information about the atmosphere over the ocean is more sparse than it is over land. We can see them on satellites and get some information from ships and planes, but there aren't reporting stations with instruments every 50 miles as there are in the continental United States. Nor are there National Weather Service offices with regular launches of weather balloons.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration flew some reconnaissance flights over the Pacific on Thursday to drop instruments with parachutes, much as it does with hurricanes, to gain some extra data for computer model runs.

So with limited information on what's happening over the Pacific and with so many systems in play, computer models are having a hard time making reliable predictions. Human forecasters are equally flummoxed.

Any meteorologist can look at the pattern and see the likelihood that a large storm will occur in the central and eastern U.S. But many specifics about track, intensity and temperature remain sketchy.

The timing of a new dose of Arctic air early next week is also problematic. An earlier arrival means more likelihood of wintry precipitation; a later arrival increases the chances of mostly rain.

What does seem likely is that a series of storm systems from the Pacific will be moving over the southern U.S. in the next couple of weeks, at the southern edge of a persistent Arctic air mass that has caused temperatures to average 9 degrees below normal in Roanoke through the first eight days of February.

We'll probably be seeing fewer and weaker reinforcements of the Arctic air, so temperatures overall are likely to be a little less cold, averaging more toward the normal of 40s in the day and 20s at night once we get past Valentine's Day. But there is no obvious warming influence on the horizon.

The air will be plenty cold enough to make almost every one of these approaching storms a borderline struggle between snow, ice and rain.

The next two weeks will define the winter.

If the Arctic wins out and two or three of these wet storms end up as ice and snow, or even if just one ends up as a huge winter storm, we will always remember this winter for that.

But if the mild and moist Pacific flow wins out, and most of the systems are rain leading to a gradual winter-ending warmup, this will always be remembered as the mostly mild winter that got its biggest snow off an unlikely Alberta clipper in early February.

The fighters are in their corners.

Let's get ready to rumble.