Kevin Myatt

Latest entries from the Weather Journal blog

• Sunday afternoon showers possible, but heavier rain likely overnight into Monday
• Sunnier, slowly warming weather on the way
• How about some uneventful weather for a change?

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.

Tropical season jumps gun

The Atlantic tropical season couldn't wait one more day to get going.

Tropical Storm Arthur formed Saturday in the Caribbean and quickly made landfall on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. Sunday was the official start of the Atlantic tropical season, which runs through Nov. 30.

The persistent La Nina pattern -- a stripe of colder-than-normal sea-surface temperatures in the central Pacific -- generally favors the Atlantic hurricane season being more active than normal. La Nina tends to reduce strong convection over the Pacific, thereby also reducing high-level winds from the Pacific that can shear apart developing tropical systems in the Atlantic.

The National Hurricane Center says there is a 60 percent to 70 percent chance of 12 to 16 named storms, including six to nine hurricanes and two to five major hurricanes (110 mph winds or greater). The hurricane center also says that there is a 90 percent chance that this Atlantic season will be near or above the average of 11 named storms.

Hurricane forecasting pioneer William Gray of Colorado State University and his assistant Philip Klotzbach, as of early April, are calling for 15 named storms, eight hurricanes and four intense hurricanes.

None of this says anything about how many storms are expected to hit the U.S. An oft-repeated fallacy about last hurricane season was that it was absent in the Atlantic. In fact, 2007 was the first Atlantic tropical season on record, dating to 1851, in which two Category 5 hurricanes made landfall -- both in Mexico.

After extraordinary 2004 and 2005 seasons, the U.S. has been hit by only one hurricane in the past two years.