Kevin Myatt is The Roanoke Times' weather columnist.

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While the weather pattern has gotten much more winterlike, as expected, a few things are still missing for any major winter storm threats.

For at least the next week, this is going to be a mostly dry, cold pattern. Most systems that threaten us will come from the northwest, so-called "clippers" out of Canada. These typically don't carry much moisture with them, have a hard time getting what little moisture they have over the mountains, and rarely tap the Gulf of Mexico or Atlantic for any additional moisture.

Except for some high mountaintop areas or west-facing moutainsides where the cold winds blow up the slope, we're probably not going to see much snow (or rain or freezing rain or sleet) this week.

It might change next week, in the lead-in to Christmas. Maybe. We'll look a little closer at that later this week. Don't cue the Bing Crosby just yet.

But for now, the drier pattern gives me a chance to tie up a couple of loose ends before winter has any chance to get crazy on us.

All hail

Did you see any hail on Friday?

You might have thought it was sleet. It was that small. But it was hail.

A large dome of cold air aloft was just enough for some thunderstorms to form as mild, moist, surface air was shoveled upward by an approaching cold front. The surface air wasn't very warm, only in the 50s, so these weren't huge thunderstorms. The tops were only about 3 miles up, not even half that of a decent summer thunderstorm.

But the storms were just vigorous updrafts to carry raindrops upward into the pool of cold air aloft, associated with an upper-level low pressure area. The raindrops froze into small hailstones, most the size of peas. The storms were not strong enough to create the kind of updrafts that could keep the hailstones going back again and again to become larger.

Frozen raindrops also make sleet, but sleet forms when rain falls through a layer of cold air between the cloud and surface. Hail forms by being carried upward into a cloud.

Getting on track

The National Hurricane Center and the media, collectively, took some heat after Hurricane Charley swerved into Punta Gorda, Fla., rather than drilling Tampa Bay.

Part of the reason was that hurricane tracking charts depict a line, showing the expected track of a storm, through the middle of a much larger shaded area, depicting the potential track of a storm. During Charley, the line led to the Tampa Bay area, but the shaded area covered the entire western coast of Florida. The NHC was correct in saying Punta Gorda was under a hurricane warning, but so much media attention had shifted to Tampa that some felt they weren't properly warned.

To address these concerns, the NHC is putting two alternate tracking charts online for public comment. One does not depict a line, but has points where the storms is expected to be centered. Another has only broad circles, with no lines or points, covering the locations a storm might be during a specific time period.

The charts can be found at nhc.noaa.gov/graphicsprototypes.shtml. An email address is listed to send comments about the charts.