Kevin Myatt is The Roanoke Times' weather columnist.

kevin.myatt
@roanoke.com
981-3341

Weather with Kevin Myatt

Recent columns

• We got graupel, but not on official record
• Moisture could get caught up in cold blast
• Forecast for Weather Journal: Partly print, with frequent Internet
• Column archive

Read the Weather Journal blog

• Sprinkles or flurries possible Tuesday, but maybe something bigger for the weekend?
• For now, it looks like a quiet, mostly mild week ahead for SW Virginia
• Coldest morning of winter so far likely across much of Southwest Virginia; Tuesday precipitation looking doubtful
• Weather Journal blog

#swvawx on Twitter

@KevinMyattWx

• Follow Kevin on Twitter at @KevinMyattWx

So, why do you guys have to go way out there to chase storms? We have lots of big storms around here.

This is a question that sometimes comes up around the time of the annual storm-chasing trip to the Great Plains that I have made each of the past three years with a group of high school and college students led by meteorology teacher Dave Carroll.

In May, we put 6,800 miles on a pair of vans as we drove into 15 states in 14 days, all for six days of storms (including at least two tornadoes) and lots of wandering in between.

And yet, at least once while we were gone and at least twice since we returned, severe thunderstorm warnings were flying left and right in our own back yard.

The first answer I offer to the question is that I do chase storms locally when the opportunity presents itself.

Time is usually the biggest obstacle to that, as family, work and church obligations come first, though I've been known to bend some of those if the weather situation is big enough.

One of the blessings of working at The Roanoke Times is our roof garden, which gave me a front-seat showing of three severe thunderstorms last summer and fall. Other times, I can at least see storms at a distance. My weather blog on roanoke.com contains many photos from this elevated downtown vantage point.

The second answer for why we travel to the Great Plains is the terrain.

I love the mountains for hiking and scenery, but the trees, hills and ridgelines block out much of the sky.

Also, roads are hilly and curvy, so it's harder to keep your bearings on a storm's location. I do know a few elevated viewing points I like to watch storms from, but if the storm watching becomes storm chasing, it becomes more challenging to follow along.

The Plains states -- the region from the Dakotas south to Texas -- offer endless miles of open terrain (though they're not table-top flat everywhere, as many believe). The roads are usually laid out on a north-south, east-west grid.

My third and most important answer is that Virginia rarely has the type or intensity of storms that is common in the Plains. For the purposes of living here, that is a blessing, as neither tornadoes nor hail bigger than golf balls are frequent.

The primary reason is that we usually don't have the strong winds at the surface or high in the atmosphere common in the Plains in spring and early summer. Our prevailing weather pattern generally favors more wind in winter than in the warm months when storms develop.

Most of our thunderstorms are called "pulse storms." They go up with a day's heat and humidity and then come down in a blast of wind and rain, sometimes hail. There's not enough wind aloft to spin them into spectacular structures or to separate their updrafts and downdrafts so that they can keep going for hours, the hallmark of supercell thunderstorms.

We might see three or four true supercell thunderstorms within 100 miles of Roanoke over a year. Three or four supercells within 100 miles of Dodge City, Kan., on a single spring afternoon would only be considered a medium-size outbreak.

The life span of most of our thunderstorms is less than an hour. It can be a dramatic show if you are right under one, but it's not easy to get to a pulse storm from somewhere else before it blows itself out.

So that is why we go to the Plains to chase storms each May instead of just waiting around here. We are far from alone, as hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people from around the U.S. and many other nations do the same thing.

So many do it that some local authorities in Plains states think the storm chaser traffic is becoming a problem. I'll dig into that issue in the near future.