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.

An online trove of weather data

One of the most frequently asked questions I receive is about where one can find daily weather data for area localities on the Internet.

One resource I often turn to (almost daily, in fact) is at the following URL: www.erh.noaa.gov/rnk/climate/f6/html/F6.html

On this National Weather Service link, you will find a wide array of weather data for each day and month back to 2000 for Roanoke, Blacksburg, Lynchburg, Danville and Bluefield, W.Va. -- the major weather stations for the Blacksburg weather service office's forecast area.

A disclaimer at the top does note: "All data below are unofficial and unedited. Edited and certified versions of these data can be obtained from the National Climatic Data Center." But I have found errors to be rare enough to consider this a valid and valuable resource.

To toot our own horn a bit, The Roanoke Times has weather data for Roanoke, Blacksburg, Bedford, Wytheville, Lynchburg, Martinsville and Lexington dating to the 1940s on the Datasphere site.

You can find that by clicking "Historical Weather Data for Southwest Virginia" on the Web site: www.roanoke.com/datasphere.

Weather Journal runs on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.