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.

Windstorm can pack a powerful punch

"Derecho" is an uncommon term used for an infrequent kind of storm system.

A derecho, as defined by the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla., is "a widespread and long-lived windstorm that is associated with a band of rapidly moving showers or thunderstorms."

On Friday, a derecho zoomed from southeast Kansas across southern Missouri and the length of Kentucky, plus parts of surrounding states, killing at least six people and leaving widespread damage from winds up to 120 mph. The derecho appeared on radar as a line of severe storms stretching into an arched shape known as a "bow echo."

According to the Storm Prediction Center, the word "derecho" was applied in 1888 by University of Iowa physicist Gustavus Hinrichs to distinguish a long-lived straight-line windstorm from the rotating windstorm known by another Spanish-origin term, tornado.

Pockets of circulation within the line of storms spun off several tornadoes on Friday. However, it can be hard to distinguish between damage caused by a derecho's straight-line winds and that caused by medium-strength tornadoes.

Friday's derecho came to the Roanoke Valley to die with a short burst of rain and a few streaks of lightning just before 10 p.m. Additional storms developed to the west and south later, prompting several tornado warnings.

Roanoke got off easy on this one. If the system had rolled across the Appalachians in the middle of a warm, sticky afternoon, we could have ended up sawing trees and picking up debris this Monday morning.

Weather Journal appears on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.