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.

August may set record for dryness in Roanoke unless Fay swings by with needed rain

Roanoke has a shot at weather history this week.

If the city's official weather-reporting station at Roanoke Regional Airport does not get at least .66 inches of rain today through Sunday, it will be Roanoke's driest August on record, dating to mid-1947.

If no rain at all falls, it will be only the third month on record to have less than a tenth of an inch of rain. It will take .07 inches to keep this from being one of the three driest months.

Roanoke has only gotten .09 inches of rain so far this month. Only two months -- October 2000 (.02 inches) and October 1991 (.04 inches) -- have had less rain. September 1991 is next on the list, with only .15 inches.

It might be surprising that, in the past 60 years, August has never really been as bone dry as it is now. Only one previous August, in 1995, had less than an inch of rain -- .74 inches.

But the possibility of setting a new August dryness standard faces a serious challenge.

The former Tropical Storm Fay originally looked like it had a good chance to bring us rain last week. Instead, it hung around Florida all week, but its remnants are likely to make a run at us by Wednesday.

Though we don't want anything close to the 20 to 30 inches that parts of Florida got, we badly need rain.

Let's see if Fay, for all the mayhem it has caused to our south, can belatedly deliver on its promise of rain for our dry region and keep August 2008 out of the record books.