Kevin Myatt

Latest entries from the Weather Journal blog

• Read the full blog

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.

Probably not a big deal ... this time

Sunday's storm is looking more and more like a light brush with winter, unless you're on one of those west-facing, high slopes somewhere.

The upper level low looks to be more of a northern stream wave, that is, traveling north of us instead of south. As such, it probably will not pull in enough Gulf of Mexico moisture and it won't trigger a low early enough to spawn anything more than some light snow on Sunday.

Behind this storm, however, a rush of true Arctic air will bring our chilliest weather of the season. This chilly stuff will start the upslope snow machine going, and some places in West Virginia and far western Virginia might see several inches.

The storm will also reset the table next week, which has a couple more wintry weather chances in it. Keep the Bing Crosby handy, ready to cue ...

Earlier: Can it dig? Will we be digging?

Let the snow speculation begin.

I'm not talking about the spotty snow showers we got early in the week. I'm talking about the first real possibility at a winter storm for our area ... but let me stress, it is just a possibility.

An upper level low pressure area is going to dive southeastward from western Canada over the weekend. The question for us is: How deeply with it dig?

How deeply it digs will go a long way to determining whether, come Monday morning, we'll be digging, scraping, brushing or just seeing pictures of someone else somewhere else doing that.

The common viewpoint of many computer forecasting models has been that it will not dig much farther south than our latitude. Were it to do that, we would be talking very light snow or none at all. The heaviest snow usually falls a few hundred miles north of the upper level low center.

Also, any surface low that would be spun off would be off the Delmarva Peninsula or farther north, much too far north for us to reap a major winter storm here.

There have been other model runs showing a much deeper dig, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. This would be a much more favorable/menacing track (choose your word, depending on whether you like snow or not) by doing two things at once -- allowing cold air to lock in farther south at the surface and aloft, and pulling up lots of Gulf moisture. Such a dig could also spin up a surface low in the Gulf or off the Southeast coast in the Atlantic, which almost always means thicker precipitation in our area.

A major problem in nailing the forecast on this is that the primary feature is still at sea over the northern Pacific, where there is little or no instrumentation or observing stations. This data is not getting fed into the models, so satellite observations and good old-fashioned computer "guesswork" (very, very educated guesses) are filling in the missing data to make a forecast.

We haven't even got to other complicating factors, such as whether the depth of cold air will truly allow snow or move us more to a mix or even cold rain.

Most interestingly, there is the possibility that additional small upper-level lows called "shortwaves" could be drawn toward the upper-level low, possibly bringing two branches of the jet stream into a close parallel called "phasing."

Phasing jet streams is how uncommon snowstorms and blizzards are born. Multiple bursts of upper atmospheric energy charge up a storm into a whirling dervish of wind, cold and snow. If these upper lows don't quite join forces, we could end up with a confusing weather map with multiple areas of lighter precipitation. I'll be keeping an eye on this through weekend, updating the online version of Weather Journal at Roanoke.com as needed. At this point, my call would be that this will ultimately become a major winter storm from Philadelphia to Maine, but not much for us.

Like good poker players, the National Weather Service offices will be tossing in only a chip or two of "chance of snow" for now, waiting to see the rest of the cards to decide whether to go "all in" on this. And if they have to fold, there may well be another game to play by Christmas. But, for most weather enthusiasts, it's just fun to be back in this game, once again.

Conditions and Storms

• Latest storm warnings and radar from the National Weather Service in Blacksburg
• Ski slopes -- in season, of course
• Road conditions
• Tropical storm updates - 24/7
• Chasing the Wind  - On the road in Tornado Alley

Recent Weather Journals

• Little hail, little snow, a couple little notes
• It will feel more like Christmas
• Weekend storm could break pattern
• Latest Weather Journals