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.

Hurricane season relatively tame so far

The 2006 Atlantic tropical season so far has been the "Alberto and Ernesto Show."

These two tropical storms, which followed similar paths 2 ½ months apart, have exemplified much of what has signified the tropical season.

Alberto and Ernesto each fought wind shear and dry air aloft, struggling to develop. Alberto fell just short of becoming a hurricane at its strongest point, while Ernesto only barely and briefly reached hurricane status, far away from U.S. shores.

Each storm was prevented entry into the wide, warm expanses of the central and western Gulf of Mexico by the jet stream, the fast-moving river of air high in the atmosphere, dipping southward. In each case, the jet-stream dip, commonly called a trough, deflected the storm eastward across Florida and then into the southeastern United States, dumping widespread heavy rain.

Tropical Storm Beryl, which formed off the East Coast, was similarly deflected, only grazing Cape Cod. Florence, which is likely to become the strongest hurricane so far this season in the Atlantic near Bermuda, will probably also be bounced away from the United States by a dipping jet-stream trough.

We are now about two weeks away from the historical peak of Atlantic hurricane season. While there are still several weeks in which it will be possible for a significant hurricane to develop and hit the U.S., I feel very safe in saying at this point that the 2006 season will not be a sequel to the repetitively devastating 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons.

There is even a reasonably good chance, I'd guess 1 in 3, that the U.S. will not experience a hurricane landfall this season, which ends Nov. 30. The last year no hurricanes hit the U.S was 2001.

Large amounts of dry air blowing west off Africa have choked opportunities for disturbances to form in the open waters of the Atlantic. Increasingly warm ocean currents in the Pacific and more widespread storminess there have continued to steal energy from the Atlantic and fan upper-level winds that have sheared apart would-be hurricanes.

Instead, we've had struggling tropical storms such as Alberto and Ernesto, and even complete fizzlers such as Chris and Debby that never got close to their feared potential.

Sure, Ernesto was troublesome for many, particularly in the eastern Carolinas and eastern Virginia, but on the scale of what the nation has seen the past two years, it won't be remembered long. For our part of Virginia, Ernesto just delivered some needed rain to relieve dry conditions on the verge of outright drought.

This is no time to take our eyes off the Atlantic, for the next legendary hurricane could at any time be a few days away. Remember how quickly Katrina formed last year east of Florida and then marched into infamy? It just takes one mediocre tropical wave to find a small pocket of favorable conditions for a few days in order for a monster to develop.

But those pockets of favorable conditions are much fewer and farther between in the Atlantic than they have been in several years. And as time goes along, it becomes more apparent that we may have a fall dominated by occasional jet-stream dips from Canada rather than by steamy swirls from the tropics.

Though we may yet have another scrape with something along the lines of Alberto or Ernesto, or perhaps even something a bit more potent, we could only be a few weeks away from talking about frost or snow flurries instead.