Kevin Myatt

Latest entries from the Weather Journal blog

• Weather Journal remains on break
• Coastal low prompts Southwest Virginia flooding
• Hurricane Ida: Something extraordinary may be happening

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.

Plains storms have rare beauty

WAKEENEY, Kan. -- Severe thunderstorms rumbled across the Carolinas on Tuesday.

But here we were, 12 people from Virginia, North Carolina, Delaware and Maryland, more than 1,500 miles away, watching a weak thunderstorm spit out cloud-to-cloud lightning and streaks of rain, most of which weren't even reaching the ground.

I wouldn't trade. I would rather have watched this storm intermittently lighting up an evening over the Plains of northeastern Colorado than lower storm clouds chunking hail and pushing out tree-breaking gusts through the Piedmont.

It is always hard to describe to someone who's never experienced a Plains thunderstorm how different even a mild storm out here is from even the most severe storms in the East.

The open expanses of prairie, the high cloud bases, the swirling winds and the enhanced ability of extremely dry air and extremely moist air to push against each other combine to create storm structures of amazing beauty, with views unblocked by trees and ridgelines.

I love trees and ridgelines. I've chosen to live among them and enjoy walking through them. I even find many aspects of our weather fascinating, which should be obvious, since I write about it year-round.

But for a couple of weeks each May, I choose to be a nomad in the Plains states, seeking out the awesome supercells over terrain that is wide open, but far from empty of character or hospitality.

After a week of quiet weather in the central United States, as the tundra made a midspring push against the advancing tropics to shove warmth and moisture away, the wind is about to start swirling out here in its age-old spring manner.

The wind was whistling again outside Wednesday morning. By Wednesday evening, we were again catching supercell thunderstorms, though not extremely violent ones, in eastern Colorado, where strong south winds were hurling dust and tumbleweed wildly.

Gulf of Mexico moisture is returning, not in a trickle, but in a torrent.

Storm chasers are on the move, too, also not in a trickle, but in a torrent.

By Wednesday night, hundreds of them, maybe a thousand or two, were clustered along the Interstate 70 corridor in Kansas, setting up for a possible multiday severe weather outbreak centered in Kansas and Nebraska.

They have come as individual weather enthusiasts and small groups in cars and sport utility vehicles, paying tour groups in vans, and university groups like us.

Somewhere in this general vicinity, the armor-plated Tornado Intercept Vehicle of Discovery Channel fame and a fleet of Doppler-on-wheels vehicles, or DOWs, will patrol the Plains in search of a close encounter with a tornado.

It's all part of Plains culture now, not to mention a boost for local economies. The hotel in WaKeeney, Kan., that we stayed in Wednesday night already had an entire floor booked to storm chasers by midday Wednesday

The cost, though, could be high for any towns in the path of tornadoes. I'm hoping that chasers are part of the solution, warning communities and collecting data on storms, and not part of the problem, clogging roads needed by emergency vehicles and law enforcement, as the severe weather unfolds.

You can see what we find in the Plains the next several days on my Weather Journal blog at roanoke.com.