Kevin Myatt is The Roanoke Times' weather columnist.

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It's beginning to look a lot like ... last year.

The prevailing weather pattern last winter featured a jet stream moving diagonally across the nation from southwest to northeast. It carried storm systems out of the Pacific across the middle of the United States toward the Great Lakes and New England.

That pattern will be re-establishing itself by the weekend, and may have some staying power. Whether it will become the predominant pattern of the winter remains to be seen.

After a dose of cold this week that will include a close scrape with snow today (more on that later in this column), milder air returns with high pressure building in from the southeast for the weekend.

Last winter's pattern featured lots of mild to warm days with a few hard shots of cold air, the most notable occurring in the first three weeks of February.

More importantly, last winter's pattern kept steering wet storm systems through the Plains and Midwest rather than over the South and mid-Atlantic.

That was great news for the drought-stricken central U.S. -- too much of a good thing for some. So much precipitation fell last winter that some previously arid areas suffered severe flooding by summer.

But storm systems continuously missing the Southeast last winter set up the present severe drought that region is suffering, and the lesser but still significant drought our region is experiencing.

Like I said, it's too early to say whether this will be the default pattern for the winter, the one the jet stream keeps bouncing back to each time after it's disrupted.

But in the short term, it will mean that this current cold snap will not last long. Hopefully, we can get one of these northeastward-moving storm systems to come close enough to sweep in abundant moisture for needed rainfall.

Clipper to clip on by

Another notable event last winter was that Southwest Virginia's only widespread snowfall occurred in early February with the passage of an Alberta clipper.

An Alberta clipper is a fast-moving low-pressure system originating near the Alberta province of Canada. It usually slides southeast, typically moving to the north of our region. Every once in a while, though, one is strong enough and moves far enough south to whiten things up around here.

This one will dip just far enough south that we might see a few snowflakes or raindrops today, but it appears that the bulk of the significant snow -- just a few inches at that -- will move just north of us.

It looks like a decent shot of snow for the West Virginia ski resorts, and maybe some white grass toward Northern Virginia, but probably nothing significant for us.

If you see white on the ground around here in the morning, you'll know it dipped a little farther south than expected.