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.

Early-season twisters are menacing beasts

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.