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.

This winter just getting weirder

We can add the great splitting storm to the list of winter weirdness in 2007-08.

I wrote earlier in the week that a series of atmospheric disturbances would be moving through, making for a complicated forecast.

They moved through one after the other Thursday night and Friday. When temperatures were the coldest Thursday night, one went north and brought some snow to West Virginia and Pennsylvania, the other moved south and dumped needed rain on Georgia and the Carolinas.

Very little of anything fell on Southwest Virginia.

By the time we did get some effect from another in the series Friday, temperatures had warmed enough that most of what little fell was just a cold rain.

It all seems strangely symbolic of a winter that has produced lots of dinky borderline precipitation events, one significant snowfall, two medium-intensity ice storms and that bizarre windstorm in bright sunshine that we'll be talking about for years.

This coming week is going to try its darndest to add another chapter to our weird winter.

A strong low pressure system crashing into California will feed energy into a jet stream pattern that will feature a deep dip over the central and eastern U.S., allowing cold air from Canada to work south.

I could make the grandiose statement that it looks like our best chance at a truly major winter storm that we've seen all season. That would be a true statement, but in this winter, it wouldn't really be saying much.

There are still just enough screws loose in the weather pattern that it looks unlikely, from this distance, that it will be a major winter storm for Southwest Virginia.

More likely, a strong low pressure system will take a path very near or just west of us around midweek, spreading yet more snow on the oft-buried Great Lakes, Upper Midwest and Ohio Valley. We would get some windy rain and a sharp cool-down behind the storm.

At week's end, we'll see several days of below normal temperatures as the calendar flips from February to March.

As with any weather event several days out, there is enough uncertainty to warrant keeping an eye on this coming week's system.

It would take some doing to get it to form in the Gulf of Mexico and move up the East Coast, the storm path that yields almost all of our more severe winter storms.

I will go out on a limb right now and say that the next one won't split and go on each side of us. It could miss us entirely or merely rain, but surely even this winter can't be weird enough to have two splitters in a row.

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