Kevin Myatt

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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.

Winter temperatures go from extreme to extreme

We are coming out of a stretch of winter that was displeasing for almost everybody.

If you like warmth, it was an absolutely miserable stretch of nearly five weeks, with persistent cold and some extreme cold. It felt all the worse considering how warm it had been in the weeks before the Arctic outbreak.

If you like snow, there wasn't much -- unless you live in one of those places that gets a lot when the northwest winds ride up the Appalachian slope. For most of us, those northwest winds mean flurries to maybe a dusting. The Feb. 6 Alberta clipper was really the only widespread snowfall during the entire cold snap, and Southside Virginia areas near Martinsville even missed out on that.

And to top it all off, many of you from Bent Mountain south into Floyd County, and in a few other scattered areas, went without heat and light for a few days last week because of an ice storm.

So it's probably a relief to almost everyone that we are moving from the Arctic-dominated pattern of the past several weeks to one featuring mild air coming out of the Pacific.

This pattern looks to last most of the next two weeks. Probably, it won't have the staying power of the November-January warm spell, and we'll have at least one more cold period in March.

It will be warm enough to bring an end to Roanoke's quest for a record-cold February. Through Monday, Roanoke's monthly temperature was averaging 29.4 degrees, or right between the 29.3 degrees of February 1979 and the 29.5 degrees of February 1978.

Normal temperatures in late February are lower 50s for highs and lower 30s for lows -- so even our seemingly mild Monday, with a high of 49 following a low of 20, was a below-normal temperature day.

With highs mostly in the 50s and lows mostly in the 30s from here to the end of the month, it will definitely be mild enough to pull the month's average temperature out of record territory, but almost certainly not warm enough on a consistent basis to keep February from ending as a colder-than-normal month.

Whether we get a record cold or warm month depends largely on whether or not weather pattern shifts occur just right to match the calendar.

We've certainly had a month of cold weather, and before that, more than a month of warm weather. But if the shifts between warm and cold occur in the middle of a calendar month rather than at the start of one, the month as a whole will be an average of the cold and warm periods and therefore end up more toward the middle.

Looking back on the 31-day period from Dec. 17 to Jan. 16, the average temperature was 47.3 degrees. If that had been a calendar month, it would have been the third-warmest winter month in Roanoke dating to 1948. That 31-day stretch could have been the second-warmest January or December on record, and was warmer than any February on record.

Similarly, looking at the 31-day period from Jan. 20 to Feb. 19, the average temperature during that spell was 31.5 degrees. That would have ranked as 14th-coldest out of nearly 180 winter months on record since 1948. It could have been the third-coldest February or the ninth-coldest January.

So we've had an extreme yo-yo pattern of late. Really, it dates back to at least late spring, as we went from a cool May, to a hot summer, to a cool early fall, to a warm late fall and early winter interrupted by one week of extreme cold in early December.

You often hear that normal is only an average of extremes. The last few months of weather seem to be proving the point.