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.

Winter's pulse hits odd rhythm

This is the darndest December.

That's what I was thinking as I walked my dog in the wee hours of Friday morning, watching huge snowflakes splatter around me.

Actually, those big quarter- to half-dollar-size wads of snow are not individual flakes, but many flakes that melted together as they fell from the sky. That's a sign that it's barely cold enough to snow. Being barely cold enough -- or barely not cold enough -- has been the hallmark of each of our minor winter weather scrapes this month.

This snow materialized almost out of thin air, it seemed. Yes, we knew there was a weak low pressure system coming, but it came at us stronger, moister and faster than expected.

The moisture found enough leftover cold air to trigger snow for many places. Almost everybody where this newspaper circulates had at least a little snow, and many of you got a fair amount of sleet, too. Most of you were sound asleep.

What was supposed to be a slight chance of scattered freezing rain, sleet or snow at the front end of rain showers turned into a low-grade winter wonderland for many people in our area. At my residence in Roanoke County just south of Roanoke city, about an inch of snow covered the ground, all the trees and rooftops.

But driving around about noon on Friday, I grasped the patchy nature of the precipitation. A mile north and a mile east of my home, there was almost no snow left on the ground at midday, when it was still mostly white where I live.

That observation has underscored the nature of the winter precipitation we have seen in Southwest Virginia this month. It has been spotty.

On Dec. 5, some folks got measurable snow, some folks got a few flakes melting on contact. On Dec. 7, some people got a brief bout of freezing rain glazing roads, others saw nothing.

The ice storm last Saturday broke some limbs in some people's yards, while others saw a night's worth of 33-degree rain. Wednesday morning, a few of you noted snow and sleet falling heavily enough to whiten the grass, while others noticed nothing.

And then came Friday morning's surprise. Most of you were not awake to see what did fall, but if you had been where I was, you would have been impressed by the way rain and sleet gradually gave way to snow, and also by how long the huge snow wads tumbled out of the sky.

In some other parts of the Roanoke Valley, a dusting on the grass and your car that melted by midmorning was all you got. It varied widely place to place in other parts of Southwest Virginia, too.

Winter definitely has more of a pulse this December than it did a year ago. Earlier this week, snow cover in the United States was about three times more expansive than it was for the same date in 2006.

Buoyed by a few extremely warm days at midmonth, Roanoke is averaging more than 3 degrees above normal in temperature for the month through Thursday, compared with almost 6 degrees above normal for all of December 2006.

But, while we've yet to have any extremely cold weather to balance out those extremely warm days, we've had many days of "seasonal" cold, the kinds of days with highs in the 40s or 50s and lows in the 20s or 30s.

And we've had these five scrapes with wintry precipitation. There was only one December day in 2006 when some parts of Southwest Virginia got a light snow.

By the middle of next week -- probably a day or two after Christmas -- another fairly strong storm system is expected to approach Virginia. Once again, from this distance, it's difficult to tell how the storm will track and how the cold air will be placed.

There is some chance this could be the season's first widespread winter storm that hammers everyone with ice and/or snow.

But both recent experience and computer model guidance would suggest that the early odds favor yet another borderline rain-ice-snow situation that is a memorable winter event for one place and just a cold rain for somewhere else just down the road.

Sooner or later, you've got to think this winter is going to clock us with something, or it's just going to give up trying.

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