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.

Dry line feeds fires, tornadoes

Wildfires raged through central Oklahoma on Thursday, scorching scores of homes. Meanwhile, not far to the east, tornadoes wrecked communities in eastern Oklahoma and western Arkansas.

Those seemingly very diverse tragedies resulted from a common factor: a dry line.

A dry line is a feature that often develops in the spring in the central United States when extremely dry air -- originating from the deserts of the Southwest and downsloping winds off the Rockies -- moves eastward to meet warm and humid air moving northward from the Gulf of Mexico.

The difference across the dry line is astounding. Dew points can be as low as the single digits on one side and as high as the 70s on the other. I've heard about people driving through the dry line with their windows rolled down, experiencing an immediate change.

The dry line is a boundary along which thunderstorms often develop, on the east side where the moisture is thick.

On Thursday, a strong low pressure system cranking up in the region also supplied strong winds at the surface. These winds whipped flames in the tinderbox conditions that developed behind the dry line, in addition to pulling in moist southeasterly winds ahead of the dry line that ramped up thunderstorms and spun tornadoes.

While boundaries between relatively dry and moist air can develop in our region, a truly extreme dry line is another item on the list of weather events Southwest Virginia doesn't have to worry about.