Kevin Myatt

Latest entries from the Weather Journal blog

• Weather Journal taking a long break
• Yes, there's still an Atlantic tropical season going on
• Freezing temperatures likely tonight

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.

Swirl of answers for hurricane question

So how many hurricanes hit the United States in 2004 and 2005?

It's become a bit of a trick question that involves meteorological semantics and a bit of revisionist history.

The three main answers you could offer to the question are eight, 10 or 12.

There are two questions that affect the answer: Was the given storm a strong tropical storm or was it a hurricane, and did the storm technically make landfall in the United States?

First, we can tick off the obvious answers. In 2004, we had Charley that hit the west coast of Florida (and later a second weaker landfall near Myrtle Beach, S.C.), Frances and Jeanne that hit almost the same spot on Florida's east coast, and Ivan that made landfall in Alabama just west of the Florida line. So that's four in 2004.

Ivan's landfall is itself a study in semantics. We commonly hear and read that Florida was hit by four hurricanes in 2004 -- but, technically, following the strict definition of where the center of circulation made landfall, Ivan came ashore just west of Gulf Shores, Ala., not in Florida.

Go try telling the people around Pensacola, Fla., whose homes and businesses were washed and blown away that Hurricane Ivan didn't hit them.

In 2005, the obvious answers are Dennis in the Florida panhandle, Katrina in south Florida and then more infamously in Louisiana and Mississippi, Rita in southwest Louisiana, and Wilma crossing the southern Florida peninsula from west to east.

So four in 2004 and four in 2005 equals eight, right?

On first glance, that would be entirely correct. But the National Hurricane Center doesn't depend on first glances. After each hurricane season, researchers do a painstaking analysis on each storm, and sometimes this results in storms being reclassified.

The 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons each included a system that was rated as a strong tropical storm, with 70 mph winds, as it made landfall.

In 2004, it was Gaston, which came ashore in South Carolina, and then perhaps more infamously inundated Richmond, flooding Shockoe Bottom.

In 2005, it was Cindy that came ashore in southeast Louisiana two months before Katrina hit the same area and forever erased Cindy from residents' memories.

In each case, the National Hurricane Center, upon later examination, decided that there was enough evidence that the storm contained 74 mph sustained winds at landfall that both Gaston and Cindy were upgraded to hurricanes months after they hit.

So with these two tropical storms upgraded to hurricanes, the number of hurricanes striking the U.S. in the busy years of 2004 and 2005 rises to 10. This is the number I have settled on using when I refer to the active hurricane seasons of the past two years.

But let's go back to Ivan a second. Just because the eye came ashore in Alabama doesn't mean that Florida wasn't in a real sense "hit" by the storm.

So what if there were cases where storms significantly affected the U.S. but the eye never came ashore?

That has happened each of the past two seasons as well.

In 2004, the season's first storm, Hurricane Alex, scraped along the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Travelers were stranded on Ocracoke Island as a result of storm surge, the worst there in almost 20 years.

But Alex's eye never came ashore, though it was nine miles from Cape Hatteras at its closest approach.

In 2005, Hurricane Ophelia scraped just east of the coast of the Carolinas. The edge of its eyewall actually came over Wilmington, N.C., but the center of circulation never came ashore, so it never officially made landfall.

Still, it caused an estimated $70 million in damage, according to the hurricane center.

So did Alex and Ophelia "hit" the United States even if they didn't make official landfall? If so, the number of hurricanes hitting the U.S. in 2004 and 2005 could be argued to be 12.

There's no argument about the number of hurricanes that have hit the U.S. in 2006 through today: The number, so far, is zero. Let's hope it stays that way.