Kevin Myatt is The Roanoke Times' weather columnist.

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Fay certainly played the diva, ignoring the script and commanding the stage for two full weeks. But it's time for Fay to get off the stage and make way for Gustav and Hanna.

It was Aug. 13 the first time I noted what would become Tropical Storm Fay on my blog, wondering, "Will this tropical disturbance become the next big thing?" That was so long ago, Michael Phelps had only won five of his eight Olympic gold medals.

Fay stubbornly refused the most direct path to infamy, staying below hurricane strength through its entire life. But it flooded Florida with 1 to 2 feet of rain as it made landfall four separate times.

Then, a week after it was originally projected to do so, it finally delivered Tuesday and Wednesday on its potential to bring major drought-easing rains to Southwest Virginia and other dry neighboring regions.

So exit Fay, enter Gustav and Hanna.

Tropical Storm Gustav, which lashed Jamaica on Thursday after a deadly hit on Haiti and the Dominican Republic, has a solid chance to be the highest-impact hurricane for the United States since the frenzied 2004 and 2005 tropical seasons.

New Orleans is nervous, and properly planning, but take with a shaker or two of salt any forecast map that shows it making a direct bead on the Katrina-scarred Crescent City some five days out.

The larger point is that Gustav is likely to move over the hot waters of the open Gulf of Mexico, it's likely to be under favorable atmospheric conditions for considerable strengthening and it may come ashore as a Category 3 (111-130 mph winds) or even stronger storm somewhere along the Gulf Coast next week.

That could be New Orleans; Galveston, Texas; Mobile, Ala., or somewhere else. Almost anywhere it hits, it would be a destructive beast.

It will at least threaten, if not cut through, the heart of petroleum production and refining territory in the western Gulf of Mexico. I'm not an economist, but you don't have to be one to figure out what that will do to gas prices.

And then, as if Gustav weren't enough, there's the newly minted Tropical Storm Hanna just northeast of the Caribbean.

Hanna's future is more uncertain, but it too will probably become a hurricane, and current projections are that high pressure to the north will force Hanna to turn west toward the Southeast U.S. just as Gustav is making landfall along the Gulf Coast next week.

There is some chance a passing low pressure system could pick up Hanna and pull it northeast away from the U.S., but that's not the expectation of hurricane forecasters.

What specific effects Gustav and/or Hanna will have on Southwest Virginia are not even vaguely discernible at this point.

If Gustav makes landfall on the central or western Gulf Coast as expected, it would probably have a hard time moving directly our way against expanding high pressure.

The remnants of most tropical systems that come ashore in the western Gulf are eventually pushed east by prevailing upper-level winds, but it's impossible to say now what Gustav would look like by then and where the bulk of it would be carried.

If Hanna does indeed take aim on the Southeast coast, it could be funneled right to us by clockwise-rotating high pressure to its north and northeast.

Any system making landfall on the Atlantic and moving right at us would have a much higher impact than did Fay. Not only would there be a threat of heavy rainfall, but it would maintain a considerable amount of its wind.

Let me emphasize that this is little more than barely educated speculation at this point. Gustav is at least five days from landfall. Hanna is a week or more away, if it even makes landfall.

What is certain is that following Fay's river-recharging rains, the stakes will be much higher if either or both of these new systems affect our region. A new tropical system will not be coming in over bone-dry ground.

A similar rain to the widespread 3 to 7 inches that just fell would almost certainly cause significant flooding.

We do still need rain, but now that the big dump has passed, it would be better to get it in something smaller than typically tropical increments.