Kevin Myatt

Latest entries from the Weather Journal blog

• Weather Journal taking a long break
• Yes, there's still an Atlantic tropical season going on
• Freezing temperatures likely tonight

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.

Sloppy storm is better than ice

I've long said that there is nothing worse than a 34-degree rain.

But there is something much worse than 34 and rain: below 32 and steady rain for two days.

As the Roanoke Valley's daylong 34-degree rain gave way to a 32-degree drizzle that glazed some car tops and trees with a thin coating of belated ice Tuesday night, my parents in northeast Arkansas were experiencing the region's worst ice storm in decades.

Northern Arkansas, southern Missouri, much of Kentucky, and parts of several neighboring states got slammed by 1 to 3 inches of ice piling up on everything, enough to snap power lines and trees. About a million were without power at the height of the storm; some won't get it back for a week or more.

This was the ice storm that some computer forecast models put our names on a few days earlier. Fortunately for us, they correctly shifted the storm northward, and we only caught the fringe of a winter catastrophe.

Computer forecast models have our name on an entirely different kind of storm for early next week -- a potential strong low pressure system moving up the East Coast. I'll get back to that.

Most of us, myself included, have a tendency to judge a weather event only by what's happening outside our door.

For many in the Roanoke Valley, Tuesday seemed like a forecasted winter storm that didn't happen, leading to schools being closed for no good reason.

In reality, other than a very iffy chance of brief snow and sleet at the front end that didn't materialize, most forecasts from the National Weather Service and television were pretty darn accurate. The timing, coverage and amount of precipitation was extremely close to what happened.

Roanoke's temperature was expected to stall at 32 most of the day, and instead, it stalled at 33 to 34. Being only two degrees off on temperature is considered a very good forecast ... but of course, the difference between 34 and 32 has a lot more impact for the general public, and therefore gets far more notice, than the difference between 78 and 76.

There was more ice out there than many realized. You only had to go a few hundred feet above the floor of the Roanoke Valley to find some of it.

Colder air was also able to seep in from the north quicker at locations east of Roanoke. Several places in Bedford County collected ice all day long. For Lynchburg, which ended up under a winter storm warning for the considerable ice that collected there, this was a much different situation than it was for Roanoke. But even in those places, this episode was nothing like it was a day's drive to the west.

Having a day off from school for a cold rain isn't really a hardship when compared to being without power for a week of cold winter days.

Our region has had its own severe ice storms, such as February 1994, which caked most of the Southeast, southern and central Appalachians, and mid-Atlantic with thick, tree-breaking ice. Ironically, I was on the fringe of that storm, too, living in my hometown in northeast Arkansas that got hammered this time around while I got the fringe in Southwest Virginia.

By this point, snow lovers are jaded by a winter that has found every way imaginable to avoid producing flakes in quantity, and sun seekers are ready to get past the cold and ice and see spring. A lot of people may not be in the mood to hear any more forecasts of snow and ice.

But there is always something new on the horizon, and early next week holds potential for a winter storm to develop somewhere in the South or East, and we could be in the zone west of its path where snow would be the most likely.

Details are not certain this far out. Like with the last storm, the computer models will probably shift as new information becomes available.

A week ago, I wrote that we would have a messy week with a borderline storm that could produce snow, sleet, ice or rain. It produced all of those things within two hours drive of Roanoke.

All that can be said from here is that there is potential for a strong low pressure system to form in a location that would give our area a reasonable shot at a significant snow -- or a windy rain.

Sooner or later, our number will come up for a big winter storm. Let's hope that when it does, whether it's early next week, later this winter or not until 2010 or beyond, it's not a destructive ice storm. I'd rather have 34 degrees and rain than that.