Kevin Myatt is The Roanoke Times' weather columnist.

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Have you received an email with attachments claimed to be Hurricane Katrina photos? Click here to find the real story.

The same weather pattern causing weeks of sunny but dry weather here could add to the misery in the Gulf of Mexico before week's end.

Tropical Storm Rita formed southeast of Florida on Sunday, and is likely headed for a brush with the Florida Keys on Tuesday before heading west into the Gulf of Mexico. With Rita expected to strengthen, hurricane warnings are already flying for the Keys and for Cuba.

Past there, a lot of folks on the Gulf Coast will be getting nervous, including some of those who have already lost so much in Hurricane Katrina.

Right now, the most favored path for Rita would take it across the Gulf to Texas rather than northward to areas already so hard hit. This conjures up the possibility of another hurricane nightmare: a direct strike to the Houston-Galveston area. That's a scary scenario in its own right, compounded by the fact that so many Katrina refugees have relocated in that area.

While Ophelia played around with the East Coast all last week, this has been decidedly a Gulf hurricane season rather than an East Coast season. Hurricanes Dennis and Katrina and Tropical Storms Arlene and Cindy have each made landfall on the central Gulf Coast area from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle. Hurricane Emily trotted west in a similar manner to what is expected out of Rita, coming ashore in Mexico.

The other tropical storms and hurricanes, excluding Ophelia and a couple that formed in the far southwest Gulf before moving into Mexico, have stayed out in the open Atlantic far away from the United States. This is what is expected with the current Tropical Storm Phillippe.

High pressure has dominated the central and eastern U.S., both at the surface and aloft. This high, while allowing a stable, dry air mass to settle in over much of the country, has also been the traffic cop for the Atlantic hurricane season.

The clockwise spin around it has directed tropical systems around it into the Gulf of Mexico rather than onto the East Coast. It's also helped deflect a number of Atlantic storms away from the East Coast, stalling or slowing their westward track until other weather systems can nudge them north into open water. (Technically, Hurricane Ophelia never made landfall, so even it would fit in this category.)

There's nothing that seems to be able to budge this big high much just yet. So we'll continue to see a fairly stable but dry weather pattern ... though a weak front on Tuesday could produce a few showers and thunderstorms, similar to what we saw on Friday. No widespread general rain or exceptional autumn cooldowns are on our horizon.

Rita doesn't look likely to give us rain, either. With the high expected to expand, the clockwise flow around it will likely keep pushing Rita farther and farther west as the week progresses.

We can hope that Katrina churned up enough cooler water in the Gulf to help keep Rita's strength in check, but there appears to be plenty of warm water to feed yet another Gulf of Mexico hurricane in this runaway tropical season.

DROUGHT UPDATE

I know darn well some of you got more rain than this (I drove through it on U.S. 460 east of Roanoke), but the Roanoke Regional Airport broke a 16-day string of no precipitation with .18 inch of rain in Friday's showers and thunderstorms.

In Blacksburg, you weren't as fortunate, and your string of no-rain days was 18 going into Monday. Conveniently, it began Sept. 1, so you've yet to see any rain in the month of September.

For Roanoke, the rain means that September definitely will not be the driest month on record (.02 inch in October 2000) or even the driest September on record (.15 in September 1991).

Blacksburg's driest September was .45 inch in 1955. Its driest month, like Roanoke, was .02 inch in October 2000. Both are still in play, and with no major changes in the weather pattern for the next week, that will get us close to the end of the month.

We'll see if Tuesday's showers can make any kind of dent in this dry spell.