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.

Climatic contrasts crank up the winds

As our world seemed to fly apart at the seams Monday, the wind kept roaring.

I wish April 16, 2007, were a date that we would have remembered only for an odd late-season nor'easter moving up the coast that caused the wind to blow down trees and knock out power as it spun a weird mix of snowflakes and blossom petals through the Southwest Virginia sky.

Focusing on weather for a few minutes in this difficult time, I have gotten quite a few e-mails lately asking about wind, specifically why it's been so windy lately and whether this is the windiest winter we've ever had.

I don't have the data at hand to answer whether the season as a whole was especially windy compared to others historically.

But I can tell you what drives big wind: Sharp contrasts.

Contrasts between hot and cold and between high atmospheric pressure and low atmospheric pressure force the wind to blow hard. Our region's mountainous geography assists in making Western Virginia an area especially susceptible to high winds during volatile winter and spring weather.

As I've detailed several times before, we have been on an unstoppable pendulum for nearly a year. Our temperatures have rocked between unusual warmth and abnormal cold.

The jet stream -- the river of air 4 to 7 miles up that moves storm systems across North America -- has made huge swings north and huge dips south for most of the past several months. The arcs northward are where warm air pokes unusually far to the north, while the southerly dips are where cold air sinks unusually far south.

When the temperature contrast between the cold air to the north of the jet stream and the warm air to the south of it is greater, the wind blowing through that jet stream is more intense. And in certain situations as storm systems move through, some of that strong wind can work its way to the surface.

Winds generally spiral out of high-pressure systems toward low-pressure systems. Think of a high-pressure system as a huge, stable mound of air pressing down and a low-pressure system as sort of a sinkhole in the atmosphere where there is a little less air to press down on the surface.

If you roll a ball off a hill toward a sinkhole, it will roll faster the steeper the hill is and the deeper the sinkhole is.

So it is with wind. The stronger the high-pressure system and the deeper the low-pressure system, the more wind blows out of one toward the other. Early this week, we were between a moderate high pressure system to the west and an extremely intense low-pressure system to the east.

Southwest Virginia's terrain plays a big role as well. The mountains poke up into fast winds aloft that would otherwise just zoom by overhead. The mountains catch the wind currents blowing from the west, and they tend to eddy toward the surface just to the east.

So those are a few answers about the wind. I wish I had better answers for the most difficult questions on all our minds right now.