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.

As spring rolls along, dampness becomes recurring theme

The state of spring in Southwest Virginia isn’t quite cold and wet, but perhaps cool and damp.

The next several days will exemplify that, as cold fronts moving through both this morning and again on Monday will bring with them a round of breezy cool after showery rain. In between, though, will be a mostly dry and fairly warm weekend.

While there may even be a few snowflakes in the mountains come Monday night, and possibly a night or two near freezing thereafter, none of the cold fronts is packing a solid punch of Arctic air.

And, unless overnight rain got more carried away than expected, the frequent rounds of rain over the past several days haven’t been particularly heavy.

It has been enough to move the Roanoke and New River valleys from moderate drought to just “abnormally dry” on the latest U.S. Drought Monitor .

Several weeks of frequent light to moderate rains, with maybe a soaker or two thrown in, could get us well out of the drought going into the summer months.

The overall jet stream pattern across the nation is a little more typical of early to mid-March than early April. Storm systems are diving very far to the south, with the severe storms and heaviest rainfall near the Gulf Coast.

Abundant rain has been falling in some of the drought-plagued areas of Georgia and the Carolinas, so much so that no areas of severe or extreme drought remain in those areas.

And it’s been snowing a ton in much of the Rockies and the central United States, as far south as Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle last week. In several recent springs, severe thunderstorms were already common much farther north in the Plains states by this time of year.

April is starting a little cooler, relative to normal, than March finished as a whole, in the region.

March ended about a degree above normal at 48.3 degrees and slightly more than a third of an inch below normal in precipitation at 3.47 inches in Roanoke, close enough to basically be considered a normal March, weatherwise.

Blacksburg was a little warmer and wetter, relative to its normals, which are uniformly colder than Roanoke’s, but very similar in precipitation. Blacksburg’s average March temperature of 43.3 degrees was nearly 2 degrees above normal, while the March total precipitation of 4.58 inches was 0.75-inch above normal.

The Climate Prediction Center  is calling for cool, damp weather to dominate over at least the next six to 10 days, with no extremely warm weather in sight.

It is quite possible that we are beginning to see dampness replace dryness as the recurring weather trend for 2009.