Kevin Myatt is The Roanoke Times' weather columnist.

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• For now, it looks like a quiet, mostly mild week ahead for SW Virginia
• Coldest morning of winter so far likely across much of Southwest Virginia; Tuesday precipitation looking doubtful
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@KevinMyattWx

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Winter is alive and well, and waiting in the wings to burst on stage.

This past week's impressive prelude to winter has reminded us of that. Amid all the fixation on the extreme tropical season and the global warming chatter, it's easy sometimes to think that we might just skip over winter.

Not so. As long as the sun angle gets lower through the autumn, as long as the days get shorter until they dwindle into months-long darkness at the North Pole, there will be winter. It will vary, as it always has, in its severity from year to year, based on myriad factors, but winter has not been cancelled.

Just ask the folks on Mount Washington in New Hampshire, where six feet of snow has fallen in 12 days, or about a quarter of the typical snowfall over an entire winter. Never before has there been anywhere close to that much snow in October on Mount Washington.

Or, closer to home, check out Snowshoe in West Virginia, where about 10 inches of snow fell early this week.

Most Roanoke Times readers west of I-81 probably saw their first flakes of snow of the season early this week, and there were rumors of a few flakes even in the Roanoke Valley. Many ridgetop areas along the Virginia-West Virginia border got their first accumulations, a full two months before the calendar says winter.

Just a couple of weeks back, we had record warm low temperatures and even a few record high temperatures. It seemed summer would never end, as the trees stubbornly held their green leaves halfway into October.

But as of Thursday morning, we've had our first widespread frost, and a growing season-ending freeze in many areas. On Tuesday, Blacksburg tied a record low maximum, or coldest high temperature for Oct. 25, when the mercury made it only to 42.

So far this season, most of the cold air has been banking up on the other side of the pole, in Siberia. Canada has been relatively mild, and the snowpack there is lagging behind.

But the really frigid air has now begun building in northern Alaska and northwest Canada. This is the source region for many of our Arctic air intrusions during the cool months. When a complicated series of developments around the globe causes the jet stream to buckle southward over eastern North America, as it did early this week, that cold air bulges southward with it.

An unusual convergence of factors brought a windy, rainy and snowy outburst to the eastern U.S. this past week. A strong cold front sagged southward, accompanied by a strong upper level low pressure area. This spin high in the atmosphere helped trigger snow in the Ohio Valley and Appalachians on Monday.

Meanwhile, Hurricane Wilma was beginning its northeastward charge across Florida and into the Atlantic, after dawdling destructively for days near the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. Wilma absorbed the remnants of Tropical Storm Alpha, a deadly storm in its own right in eastern Cuba.

All of these systems did not fully combine, as with the "Perfect Storm" back in 1991. This was an "imperfect storm," but bringing so much energy from both the tropics and the tundra in such close proximity caused widespread wind and rain from Florida to Maine ... and where it was cold enough inland, some unseasonably heavy snow.

Not all of it was in the high mountains, as places like Binghamton, N.Y., and State College, Pa., saw 2-6 inches of wet snow clinging to ever tree branch and, too often, late summer-like foliage. The result of sagging trees and power lines, combined with gusty winds, was numerous power outages. Combined with the worse-than-expected damage Florida suffered with Wilma's passage, this was a miserable week for many millions of people.

The cold air will modify and retreat during the next week, and the latest tropical entity, Tropical Storm Beta, will probably stay far to the south of the U.S. in the western Caribbean near Central America, where it could be a flooding menace.

But hurricane season isn't over yet, and winter really hasn't even begun. One wonders if it's not autumn that is the truly endangered season this year, getting squeezed out between the overactive tropics and the impatient tundra.