Kevin Myatt

Latest entries from the Weather Journal blog

• Weather Journal remains on break
• Coastal low prompts Southwest Virginia flooding
• Hurricane Ida: Something extraordinary may be happening

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.

Our soaking pattern leaves storm chasers dry

While I was out for two weeks watching Gulf of Mexico moisture struggle to make any kind of northward advance to fuel the big May storms that are typical in the Plains states, the floodgates opened in Southwest Virginia.

Blacksburg, with 9.54 inches of rain in May, and Roanoke, with 6.87 inches, each experienced their wettest months since June 2006.

As a result, Blacksburg is more than 4 inches above normal in rainfall for the year to date, topping 23 inches, while Roanoke has closed to within an inch of its normal at just over 17 ½ inches.

This doesn't include any additional rains that occurred Thursday or overnight as a new Southeast U.S. low-pressure system pinwheels along a slow-moving front. The new storm even supplied enough wind dynamics for rotating storms in Franklin and Henry counties and points eastward on Thursday, and many locations saw severe storms on Wednesday.

Though the rains have been somewhat spotty by their tropical downpour nature, any sense of short-term or even mid-term drought is history in our region.

Something close to normal rainfall at regular intervals would still be beneficial moving forward. That's been hard to come by in recent years with an alternating pattern of drought and soaking rain.

The major cause of the rainy pattern is an atypically early tropical low that moved inland over the Southeast on May 22 and 23 and then only slowly moved northward.

Besides the low physically carrying dense moisture inland, the counterclockwise circulation streamed moisture inland from both the Gulf of Mexico and the western Atlantic Ocean for days over the eastern half of the nation.

The same counterclockwise flow brought northeast and north winds over much of the central U.S. and the western Gulf of Mexico. This stymied the flow of Gulf moisture into the Plains states, drastically reducing the coverage and intensity of severe thunderstorms that typically peak during the latter half of May.

The severe storm lull happened to coincide with the annual Virginia Tech storm chase trip to the Plains states.

We delayed four days to try to wait out an initial pattern change involving a large central U.S. high-pressure system, but the Gulf low turned out to be an even bigger problem than the high.

Dew points struggled mightily to reach the low 50s during most of our time in the field, when 60s and even 70s are more common.

Other than a powerful and unusual supercell thunderstorm north of Dallas on May 26 (an event I will revisit in a later column), all we caught were cells that were barely severe in southwest Oklahoma on May 25 and in eastern South Dakota on May 31.

The weather pattern gives and takes. Much of the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic has been washed out of its drought, while Plains residents were given a break from their typically intense severe weather season.