Kevin Myatt

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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.

Death toll still low from tornadoes

Tornadoes can still kill people. We've been reminded of that lately.

They haven't killed many people this year, though.

After no tornado deaths in April, May, June and July — an unprecedented and blessed run of zeroes through the brunt of the U.S. tornado season — tornadoes have claimed lives in the past two weeks in Wyoming and Wisconsin, as a changing August weather pattern brings Canadian cool in contact with this summer's tropical mugginess.

Wisconsin was nailed by 28 confirmed tornadoes on Thursday, according to the National Weather Service, the most ever reported in that state in a single day. One person was killed in an F3 tornado (158-206 mph winds) that was up to a half-mile wide and stayed on the ground for 17 miles and 40 minutes.

The two August tornado fatalities bring the 2005 national total to seven deaths. Four died in January, and one in March.

The low-water mark for tornado deaths in the U.S. is 1986, when there were only 15 fatalities. In that year, there were no tornado deaths in September, October, November or December. That would be wonderful to repeat.

With the exception of May, it's not really that there have been so many fewer tornadoes this year.

May, with 134 tornado reports, had about 300 fewer tornadoes nationally than the May average in the three previous years. February, March, April and July have had very similar numbers to the 2002-04 average, while January and June have actually had many more tornadoes than the 2002-04 average in those months.

There were 36 fatalities in 2004, 54 in 2003 and 55 in 2002. There has not been a triple-digit fatality year since 130 died in twisters in 1998, but there also has not been one with fewer than 30 deaths since only 25 died in 1996.

Since modern-record keeping began in 1950, there have only been five years with 30 or fewer tornado deaths, but 11 with more than 100 — including three with more than 300 and more than 500 in 1953.

So, could 2005 be the first single-digit tornado fatality year in U.S. history?

It's certainly late enough in the year to talk of it as a possibility, with the bulk of the tornado season behind us. But it's much, much too early to talk of that as a certainty.

Historically, each of the four months beyond August has about a 50 percent chance of having no U.S. tornado fatalities. However, there are notable exceptions.

In 2002, 37 people were killed by November tornadoes compared to 18 in the other 11 months combined. And last year, when 16 died in the last four months, including eight in September from an unprecedented spree of hurricane-spawned tornadoes.

It's the current weather pattern that gives me pause in whether to expect the ultra-low tornado death toll to continue. For one thing, we are in the midst of one of the busiest hurricane seasons on record — though it's on a hiatus for the moment — with nine named storms already.

Tropical Storm Cindy was quite a tornado producer when it came ashore in early July along the Gulf of Mexico coast. Hurricanes Frances and Ivan spawned more than 100 tornadoes each last fall. Will we get something like that again out of this tropical season?

Also, the sudden upsurge of tornadoes and big thunderstorms in the past several days — not just in Wisconsin, but in places from Kansas to Ontario — may mark the start of a more potent severe weather pattern.

Not only is the cool air starting to move south into hot, muggy air , but stronger atmospheric winds aloft are dipping south with the jet stream. That's what helped get those storms spinning the last several days in the northern Plains and Midwest. So additional cold fronts, and the faster jet stream dipping farther south, could trigger a few more big severe weather events as summer moves toward fall.

That's little more than educated speculation at this point. But the sad truth is that it just takes one tornado, in the wrong place at the wrong time, to run the death toll up. Let's pray that doesn't happen.

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