Kevin Myatt

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• UPDATE 5:30 PM: We'll remember this for winds, not snow
• UPDATE 12:40 PM: Window for pure snow closing; sleet/freezing rain more likely
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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 may be a dud, thankfully

It's getting about time to throw in the towel on this Atlantic hurricane season.

I think it's going to be a blessed dud.

The Colorado State University hurricane forecasting team of William Gray and Philip Klotzbach came close to tossing in the towel this week. Their new report is calling for just two more named storms and only one hurricane in the entire Atlantic basin before this season winds down.

It seems quite certain at this point that this hurricane season, with nine named storms and five hurricanes two weeks past the season's historical peak, will fall significantly short of the original Colorado State prediction of 15 named storms and seven hurricanes, as well as the National Hurricane Center prediction of 13 to 16 named storms and eight to 10 hurricanes.

September was a moderately active month in the Atlantic, with four named storms, all hurricanes. Each of them -- Florence, Gordon, Isaac and Helene -- curved harmlessly away from the U.S. East Coast.

In August, it was dry air from the Sahara desert that was shutting down hurricane development. In September, it was an unfavorable upper air pattern that curved what hurricanes there were away from the United States. For the rest of the season, it is likely to be the intensifying El Nino in the Pacific that will slam the door shut on the season.

When we got to the end of September without a hurricane having made landfall in the United States, I did a quick survey of years since 1900 to see how many years that got through September without a hurricane hitting the U.S. finished that way.

Survey said: 80 percent.

In those 106 years, there were 25 seasons when no hurricanes had made U.S. landfall as of Sept. 30. In only five of those years -- 20 percent -- were there hurricanes that came ashore on an American beach Oct. 1 or later.

Most recently, the years 2001, 2000, 1994, 1993 and 1990 did not have a hurricane striking the U.S. through Sept. 30. And each of those years finished without one.

The last time the U.S. got to Sept. 30 without a hurricane, but then had one later, was 1987, when Hurricane Floyd ventured into the Florida Keys during the second week of October. The fact that you probably remember another Hurricane Floyd hitting the Carolinas and eastern Virginia in 1999 is proof that Floyd '87 wasn't too big a deal -- it didn't get its name retired, as really destructive hurricanes do.

Other years in which the U.S. experienced a late hurricane after getting to Sept. 30 without one include 1968, 1946, 1925 and 1923.

In four of the five tardy hurricane seasons, the late hit occurred in Florida. In 1968, Hurricane Gladys crossed Florida from west to east on Oct. 19. In 1946, before hurricanes were named, one made landfall near Tampa on Oct. 8.

The really weird year was 1925, when a hurricane moving northeast out of the Gulf of Mexico made landfall south of Tampa on Dec. 2. That's right, the first and only hurricane to hit the U.S. in 1925 occurred a little more than three weeks before Christmas.

In 1923, the season's first U.S. landfall occurred in Louisiana on Oct. 16.

The U.S. hasn't completely missed death and damage this tropical season, and Virginia appears to have borne the brunt of what there was, with at least a half-dozen deaths in eastern Virginia attributed to Tropical Storm Ernesto as August melted into September.

But after what some areas of the Gulf Coast and Florida have gone through the past two years, what could be a hurricane no-hitter in 2006 is exactly what this nation needed.