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.

Taking a look at ice cap melt

Many scientists' eyes are on the Arctic Ocean to see how much of the ice cap melts this summer, following last summer's extreme melt-off to more than 1.8 million square miles below normal.

Currently, there is a wider expanse of Arctic ice than there was at the same time a year ago, about 300,000 square miles more. But studies have found that much of that ice is relatively thin. The most rapid melting period is from now through September.

Long-term planetary warming, widely believed to be related to greenhouse gases released by human activity; natural climatic oscillations lasting many years; and year-to-year weather variability all play a role in how much Arctic sea ice melts in the summer.

Connecting the dots between Arctic ice expanse and weather patterns is difficult. Last year's melt-off was followed by an unusually cold winter in the Arctic Circle and the widest snow cover expanse on record in the Northern Hemisphere.

Also, oddly, the record low ice expanse in the Arctic occurred at the same time as a record large ice expanse in the Antarctic. The Antarctic record was by a razor-thin margin while the Arctic record was a runaway. Satellite ice coverage records date only to the late 1970s, however.

Buoyed by lingering sea ice around Antarctica, total global sea ice briefly peaked at more than 600,000 square miles above normal early this year, its largest expanse relative to normal since 2001. Since then, it has dropped to about the same margin below normal.

Go on the Web to the University of Illinois' "The Cryosphere Today" at arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/ to see easy-to-read charts and graphs concerning polar ice concentration.