Kevin Myatt

Latest entries from the Weather Journal blog

• Thankful to be back on Weather Journal
• Weather Journal remains on break
• Coastal low prompts Southwest Virginia flooding

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.

Weather isn't necessarily easier to predict in the plains

Reader question: Is it harder to forecast weather in the mountains than in the open plains of the central United States?

Phil Hysell, warning coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Blacksburg, worked nine years in Kansas and Missouri before moving to Virginia. His answer: It depends.

"In many cases the mountains add to the complexity and challenges of forecasting, at other times they add an element of predictability (their influences are always there since they don't move); it all depends on the situation," Hysell wrote me in an e-mail answer which he said science officer Steve Keighton also contributed to.

Terrain factors can get especially complicated in winter with borderline precipitation events. Frequently, higher elevations are colder and can get several inches of snow, while lower elevations see rain. Determining the precise elevations where precipitation types change is difficult.

Sometimes, the situation flips. Strong southerly winds aloft can raise temperatures in higher elevations several degrees above freezing while leaving pockets of cold air in the valleys -- a prescription for hard-to-pinpoint, severe, localized ice.

But in the common winter situation called cold-air damming, when cold air oozes southward from New England and eastern Canada, it is easy to determine where the cold air advance will stop because the mountains do not move.

Every region has its quirks. Difficulty of forecasting depends more on the atmospheric situation than on the geographic location.