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.

Hot summer no portent for winter

As we head into what might be one of our hottest early October stretches on record, with temperatures possibly pushing toward 90 on Sunday and Monday, perhaps it would be a good time to talk about the winter ahead.

Over the years, I've received a number of questions about what summer weather portends for the winter that follows.

Some people seem to think it's natural that a hot summer, like we've experienced this year, would lead to a warm winter. Others insist that extreme summer heat is followed by similarly intense winter cold.

Looking at Roanoke's weather records over the past 60 years, I have come to just one firm conclusion: What the weather is like in summer means little or nothing about what it will be like the following winter.

There are multiple examples of hot summers being followed by mild winters and hot summers being followed by cold winters.

Before this summer, the hottest August on record in Roanoke was in 1959, a year that also had 90-degree weather as late as the first week of October. But the hot summer and early fall of 1959 were followed by a winter and early spring of 1959-60 that produced a total of more than 5 feet of snow in Roanoke.

The summer of 1977 is still the leader in the number of days at or above 100 in Roanoke with eight. That summer was followed by the bitterly cold winter of 1977-78. January and February 1978 were the second and fifth coldest months on record, respectively, and more than 3 feet of winter snow fell.

But the blistering hot summer of 1983, when temperatures soared as high as 105, was followed by a mild winter with less than 10 inches of snow. The ferociously hot summers of the early 1950s were also followed by unremarkable winters.

The summer of 1999, the last time it hit 100 before this past August, was followed by a winter in early 2000 with only a brief period of cold and snow in late January.

Cool summers don't seem to lead to anything in particular, either.

The 1960s had many cool summers; the winters that followed were usually cold and snowy. But most of the past decade has had relatively mild summers as well, yet only one winter in that time has been colder and snowier than normal.

Our winter weather is dictated by the whims of the jet stream, which is controlled by the placement of high and low pressure systems, which are influenced by a myriad of atmospheric and oceanic factors around the world.

The overall atmospheric pattern tends to change slowly during the summer months, but as the season slides toward winter, the jet stream pattern can shift many times.

So, though hot and dry weather is tough to dislodge once it gets set up, the shifting jet stream of the cooler seasons always throws an element of uncertainty into how the weather will turn out for winter. And, of course, it can change many times during the course of a winter.

Back and forth the jet stream goes; where it stops, nobody knows.

It's still anybody's guess how the winter of 2007-08 will turn out. I consider any effort at seasonal forecasting to be only slightly more accurate than throwing at a dartboard blindfolded.

Certainly, signals like the developing La Nina in the Pacific Ocean and persistent fall drought over the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic would point more toward a mild winter than cold one.

But some other factors, like the North Atlantic Oscillation and its critical placement of highs and lows downstream from the U.S., are not settled.

It's much too early for the snow lovers to despair or the snow haters to gloat.

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