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.

It's been either drought or deluge the past few years

If I had to put a label on the weather since 2000 in Southwest Virginia, I would call it the "Drought-and-Deluge Decade."

The first decade of the 21st century is far from over, but nothing has so characterized the decade so far more than yo-yo between extremely dry and wet periods.

Since 2000 finished six-hundredths less than 3 inches below Roanoke's official "normal" annual precipitation of 42.49 inches (the average for the period 1970-2000), no other year has finished so close to normal. The extremes are 2001, which was almost 17 inches below normal, and 2003, which was more than 11 inches above normal.

It doesn't always have to be like this. As recently as 1990-94, five straight years finished within 3 inches of normal.

Let's move to the here and now. I've mentioned before how the extremely rainy last week of June would probably be enough to keep reservoir levels and stream flows high enough through the summer to spare us severe drought problems. It appears that has been the case.

But now, without much in the way of widespread rainfall across the region, official drought has returned to the region. The National Drought Mitigation Center in Lincoln, Neb., has placed most of Southwest Virginia in its lowest stage of drought, D1 or "abnormally dry," for the first two weeks of August.

First, it was a small area of Virginia from Roanoke south through Martinsville into North Carolina. In Thursday's most recent update, the "abnormally" dry area now includes all of Virginia except the far southwest and southeast corners -- basically everybody but Tidewater and the coalfields.

Roanoke is now more than 7 inches below normal in precipitation for 2006 to date, while Lynchburg and Danville to our east are each more than 8 inches below normal. Blacksburg is actually doing pretty well relative to normal, at only a quarter-inch below normal, but that's mostly because of the June deluge.

Roanoke finished 2005 more than 5 inches below normal. But this two-year dry period has been interrupted by occasional bursts of heavy rain, such as the first week of October 2005 and the last week of June, to keep it from slipping into absolute lake bed-cracking drought.

The early 2000s dry period was much different. In the two-year period from October 2000 to September 2002, 17 of 24 months were an inch or more below normal in precipitation for Roanoke, while only one month was an inch or more above normal. There simply weren't downpours to give any relief to the long-term drought.

One of our wettest periods on record immediately followed, as 2002 ended with three months an inch or more above normal in precipitation. Five of 12 months in 2003 were an inch or more above normal as 2003 finished with 53.58 inches, the third wettest year on record since the airport recording station was established in 1948.

The year 2004 finished at 5 inches above normal, primarily attributed to the Frances-Ivan-Jeanne trifecta of tropical systems dumping more than a foot of rain in September.

If you want to find something larger that correlates with our pattern of wet and dry the past few years, the El Nino Southern Oscillation works best. Our driest periods roughly correlate to the cold phase of sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific, known as La Nina, while our wettest periods in and around 2003 roughly correlate with a period of El Nino, or warm central Pacific sea surface temperatures.

It really even correlates better than the state of the Atlantic tropical season does. A busy 2004 hurricane season resulted in a wet year for us mainly because of one wet month. An even busier 2005 hurricane season, however, was part of a drier-than-normal year, including an extremely dry September.

Now that sea surface temperatures are starting to warm in the Pacific, perhaps the yo-yo will bounce back to the wet side of things in a few months.