Kevin Myatt is The Roanoke Times' weather columnist.

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On March 1, 1997, I stood on a northeast Arkansas roadside watching flashes of light erupt as an ugly twisting mass of clouds exploded transformers and snapped power lines just a few miles to my north. The wind at my back, out of the south, sped toward the spinning blob, feeding the beast.

I did not have a camera on that brief storm intercept. Few would have readily identified a tornado in any photo I could have come out with. I was not absolutely certain at the time I was watching one, but a later National Weather Service survey confirmed that a tornado had traveled on the ground more than 75 miles through five counties, killing three people.

In all, 25 people died that day in 15 tornadoes ripping across Arkansas. Another died in a Tennessee twister.

Fast-forward 10 years. Another round of tornadoes on the first day of March has dealt heartbreak and misery, killing at least 20 people in the South and Midwest.

Eight students ducking for shelter at an Enterprise, Ala., high school were killed. It's not the first time a school has been hit by a tornado with tragic consequences, as the accompanying graphic shows, but precedence does nothing to numb the pain and sadness of young lives cut short.

Tornadoes can be deadly anywhere and anytime. Even the weakest tornado is enough to push automobiles off a highway or fling debris in a manner that can maim or kill. The strongest tornadoes, which even these in Alabama and Georgia might not have approached, can level subdivisions, sweeping foundations clear.

But early-season tornadoes in the Southern states are often particularly menacing beasts because they can be so powerful, yet so hard to see, even in daytime, like the one I watched 10 years ago. They don't form picturesque, snaking funnels visible miles away like the later-season tornadoes in the Plains commonly do.

Early-season tornadoes near the Gulf are ugly monsters, blobs of spinning misery low to the ground, cloaked in rain, often not seen until they get over a hilltop or past a pine grove.

They get most of their energy from thick moisture being pulled off the Gulf of Mexico and strong winds low in the atmosphere that are spun into a frenzy by the collision of warm and cold that results from the seasonal transition between winter and spring. The storm system spawning the deadly tornadoes this week also spun out flooding rain and blinding snow in other areas of the nation. We took a close look at this developing storm system in my column Wednesday.

Along with Pulaski County High School meteorology teacher Dave Carroll, I spent Thursday evening at the University of North Carolina at Asheville discussing tornadoes and severe thunderstorms with meteorology students.

The breaking news from Alabama served to underscore the seriousness of the matter, and the importance of what they are studying to do.

As horrible as these deadly tornado days are, it has been 50 years since 100 people died in a single tornado in the United States. That used to happen with regularity. It has been 34 years since more than 300 people were killed in tornadoes in a single year.

Forecasting and public awareness are much better than they once were. But they can always get better.

A well-forecasted storm in Enterprise, Ala., showed, however, that sometimes there is only so much one can do in the face of violent weather.

I'll get back to the snow

I wrote in Wednesday's "Weather Journal" that today's column would focus on why it has snowed so little in Roanoke in recent years. In light of the deadly tornadoes, I shifted the focus for today. I'll get back to the subject of local snowlessness soon.