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.

Tornado chasers get up close to a whirl of activity

VORTEX2 hit the jackpot Friday evening.

The VORTEX2 (Verification Of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment) armada of about 40 vehicles and 100 scientists successfully deployed on a tornadic supercell in eastern Wyoming. Mobile radar units scanned the storm, and probes were planted to collect data, all in an effort to better understand tornadoes and the supercell storms from which they spring.

The Weather Channel, following along with VORTEX2, broadcast the tornado live to its viewers. Tornadovideos.net successfully put an armored vehicle directly into the tornado, providing some stunning video of whirling debris via a camera encased in a reinforced glass bubble atop the vehicle.

Scores of other storm chasers caught the long-lasting, highly photogenic, well-backlit tornado as it spun across almost totally open terrain with no threat to populated areas -- an ideal event for storm chasers.

It was a little late for our Virginia Tech storm chasing team. Our two-week time frame ended four days earlier. But congratulations are in order for the persistence and patience of the scientists in VORTEX2, and for reams of collected data that hopefully will lead to better tornado forecasting.