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.

Odds look bad for needed snow

If there is a winter in which the "big one" could be a good thing for everyone, this is it.

Put aside your preconceived notions about snow -- passionate love or passionate hatred for most, it seems -- and consider the big picture.

We are in moderate drought, and very blessed not to be in severe or extreme drought like parts of Alabama and Georgia.

We've just finished Roanoke's driest November on record, and 2007 appears likely to be one of only four years in the past 60 not to see 30 inches of rainfall.

If we stack some dry winter and spring months on top of that, we could be in Atlanta's position of worrying about our water supplies come summer.

Ample snow is inarguably one of the best cures for drought. Melting snow moistens the ground more evenly than rain, which tends to run off rapidly. A big snow is like getting a slow rain over several days.

True, we could get our needed snow this winter in a series of small to medium events rather than one or two big storms. The problem is that there are many things arguing against a repeated pattern of smaller winter storms.

La Nina is occurring in the Pacific. The colder-than-normal waters in the central Pacific correlate strongly to mild and dry winter weather through much of the southern United States. We're on the north edge of the area where this correlation is the strongest.

During La Nina, we usually do not get a lot of those juicy storm systems that move out of the Pacific and cross the southern U.S.

Then there is that self-propagating nature of drought. It's much more pronounced in summer, when heat comes into play, but can be noticeable in winter, too.

Areas with dry ground have less surface evaporation, so the atmosphere tends to have less moisture. As a result, it's harder to get precipitation to occur over that dry ground. Some weaker systems that would cause substantial precipitation in wetter times might struggle to yield even a few droplets or snowflakes as the dry air sucks up what moisture is available.

The area of driest ground is to our south and southwest, between our region and our primary source of atmospheric moisture, the Gulf of Mexico. It's possible that has already had some impact in our last two potential rainmaking systems, producing scarcely anything.

So some of the weaker disturbances coming across the south that would typically give us our 2- to 4-inch snows may struggle as they come over the new "desert of the Southeast."

I think we'll have enough cold air, intermittently, for some winter storm threats, probably more cold days and less extremely warm ones than last winter.

The pattern over the northern Atlantic the next couple of weeks will be ideal to push Arctic air southward over us, beginning early next week. If that pattern becomes habitual, we could have a much colder winter than anyone is forecasting.

But the lack of moisture is a huge issue. So even if it's cold, we may be hard-pressed to get it to be white.

There's always a chance that one storm system can sweep into the Gulf of Mexico at just the right time, combine with Arctic air oozing south from Canada at just the right time and roar up the East Coast to spread a mighty wallop of white.

I could be wrong, and frequently have been in recent winter "guesscasts," but I think we're looking for that one home run if we want to see drought-easing snowfall. And the odds are against it.

If we can't get much snow this winter, we need the next best thing, which is a lot of rain during winter and spring. I think all of you snow lovers and snow haters despise cold rain.