Kevin Myatt is The Roanoke Times' weather columnist.

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Today is May 22, the date that big things have happened for the Virginia Tech storm chase team.

In 2004, the chasers encountered a classic funnel raking the ground in southern Nebraska -- and then had to make a frenzied escape.

In 2007, saucer-shaped "mothership" supercells hovered over Kansas for hours, spawning a couple of tornadoes.

And in 2008, we saw eight tornadoes in a single afternoon, including a close sundown encounter with a cone-shaped twister, eerily backlit by yellow, south of WaKeeney, Kan.

That was followed by the only really frightening thing I've encountered in my four years on the trip, as we were briefly swept into the supercell's "rear-flank downdraft" with 80 mph winds whipping rain and golfball-sized hail. It's called "getting hooked" -- but we don't want to make it a habit.

We're out again on this May 22, but unlikely to have a day like any of those.

Virginia Tech's 2009 storm chase is off to a late start. Originally scheduled to start Sunday, team leader Dave Carroll and I made the decision last week to hold off a few days to see if we could better time the trip for a more productive severe weather pattern. We ended up leaving Thursday.

We are limited to two weeks by our budget, so we want to make the most out of our window of time for the student chasers, most of whom have never witnessed high-caliber supercell thunderstorms or tornadoes on the open Plains and may never have such an opportunity again. But there are no guarantees.

The recent pattern of high pressure in the West and low pressure in the East tends to reduce storminess in the nation's midsection by blocking the movement of systems across the West and keeping Gulf of Mexico moisture from advancing northward. There are few real signals that the pattern will change significantly in the next few days.

We have grown accustomed to this pattern in each of the past four May trips. It never relented in 2005 or 2006. We caught a few, relatively mild storms in '05, finally seeing storms with significant rotation on our final chase day in eastern Colorado. In '06, we went to unconventional chase areas in North Carolina, Illinois and Wisconsin. We filmed a brief tornado outside Durham, N.C., and caught one of the most spectacular supercell thunderstorms we've seen in central Illinois.

We simply waited out the pattern in 2007 and 2008, wandering around as tourists both years, going a full week without significant storms last year.

But the wait was worthwhile in each of the past two years, yielding huge days on May 22, each year near WaKeeney, Kan., on Interstate 70 in the west-central part of the state. In 2007, we idled in a Super 8 motel parking lot at WaKeeney, waiting on the storms to fire; the next year, we stayed two nights at the same Super 8.

That Super 8 actually sustained damage to its lobby on the evening of May 22 from the same tornado that we intercepted south of town. A convenience store across the road, where we had bought gas and food items in the morning, had its entire front side blown in by tornadic winds.

Each year presents different challenges and yields different results.

If fishermen always caught the same size, type and number of fish every time they went, then fishing would be boring, and fishermen wouldn't get hooked.

The same is true with storm chasers. Forrest Gump might say a storm chase is like box of chocolates -- you never know what you're going to get.

Weather Journal appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.