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.

As expected, storm season is underwhelming

The Atlantic hurricane season is living up to its low expectations.

So far, Hurricane Bill has been the lone significant storm. It peaked at Category 4, but was deflected away from the United States by the persistent southward-dipping jet stream.

The last two efforts were given more promise on computer forecast models than they bore out in the atmosphere.

Tropical Storm Danny got absorbed into a cold front and low pressure system moving off the East Coast, while shearing winds aloft simply took Tropical Storm Erika apart in the eastern Caribbean.

Atlantic tropical seasons that are concurrent with El Nino, the periodic warming of central Pacific sea surface temperatures now ongoing, generally produce fewer and weaker tropical systems than average in the Atlantic.

Still, new waves move off Africa every few days, each with potential to develop into a significant hurricane if one can find a patch of hot sea surface temperatures and light winds aloft. Other systems, like disturbances in the Caribbean or stalled cold fronts across the Gulf of Mexico, can spin up into tropical storms quickly given the right conditions.

With high pressure building over the northern U.S. the next several days, a period of time is upcoming when an Atlantic tropical system could get pulled into the United States by the high's clockwise wind flow. But with each passing day, the odds improve of this season being a hurricane no-hitter for the American coastlines.

Weather Journal appears on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.