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.

Conditions not extreme enough to be La Nina

Remember how, for months, experts acknowledged a sagging economy but debated whether or not it had yet met the definition of a recession?

Weather has something resembling that. Climatologists note that La Nina conditions exist in the central Pacific, but they have not yet met the parameters of being a "La Nina episode."

Translation: Sea surface temperatures have generally been cooler than normal in the equatorial Pacific, but not quite widespread and extreme enough over a long enough period of time to be classified as a full-fledged La Nina.

In our region, La Nina is generally correlated with mild, dry winters. Our winter so far has been neither mild nor dry. But it hasn't been, on the whole, unusually cold or wet either, as I mentioned Monday.

The near-La Nina may be enough to have kept wet Pacific storms from frequently crossing the southern United States, soaking our region, but not enough to cause high pressure off the southeast U.S. coast to deflect cold air masses, as often happens in a La Nina episode.

The atmospheric pattern appears as if it is shifting the next one or two weeks to allow more of these wet Pacific storms to move across the country. But if La Nina conditions continue to hold, drier weather will be more likely in the long run as we head into spring.