Kevin Myatt

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• Thankful to be back on Weather Journal
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• Coastal low prompts Southwest Virginia flooding

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.

To discuss climate, get past the weather

There is lots of discussion about climate change these days. But before the discussion can really be as broad or as informed as it needs to be in our society, the concepts of "climate" and "weather" must be distinguished from each other. And in so much of the commentary I see, they are not.

Climate is about long-term averages; weather is about short-term conditions.

Climate is the three-hour movie; weather is one or two frames from that movie. Climate is a baseball season; weather is one inning in one game.

Seeing my favorite slugger Albert Pujols go down on three swings of the bat when you tune into ESPN for a few minutes doesn't change the fact that he has been one of the most consistent hitters in the major leagues for years or that his team, the St. Louis Cardinals, is leading the National League Central. Similarly, if you see a little-used bench warmer on a last-place team slug a home run, it may be a great highlight, but it's not indicative of the player's career or the team's season.

It is true that 19 of the world's 20 hottest years on record have occurred since 1980. But the period since 1980 has also included Roanoke's coldest temperature on record (11 below zero on Jan. 21, 1985) and deepest 24-hour snowfall (22 inches, Jan. 6-7, 1996). The trend of a warming world climate, whatever may be causing it, does nothing to reduce the significance of two cold weather records in Roanoke, and vice versa.

I recently saw a news release from a public interest group connecting the early August heat wave in the eastern United States to global warming.

This is a bad starting point for anyone to make serious claims about global warming. For one thing, it was a historically mediocre heat wave in our part of the country, not really that big a deal compared with several in the past, including many before anyone put the words "global" and "warming" together. Secondly, a summer heat wave, any summer heat wave, is weather, not climate, caused by the position of high and low pressures at a given time, nearly impossible to connect to averages spanning decades.

It's a claim further blurred by the fact that global warming theory does not specify that every single point on Earth would warm equally ... and that some localities or regions might even cool as oceanic and atmospheric patterns shift.

An environmental group conducted a media event in March, focusing on biological signs of spring starting earlier over many years, on a day when the temperature was several degrees below normal and there were snow flurries. Critics mocked the group, pointing to the ironic weather that day.

But really, one day of cold weather in March did nothing to lessen its claims. The March cold snap was a weather event, one day of one year, while the group was talking about the effects of climate observed over many years.

We're having a much-cooler-than-normal September. New Delhi, India, had its first frost in 70 years last winter. Parts of South Africa had the first accumulating snow there in a generation this winter (our summer). But each of those are weather events. They do not necessarily reflect climatic trends.

Any particular hurricane -- Katrina comes most obviously to mind -- is a weather event. It is caused by the state of the atmosphere and ocean at a given time. A single weather event cannot be definitively linked to larger climatic patterns.

But important research is ongoing about whether there is clear evidence about whether the number of intense hurricanes has shown a discernible increase over decades. Papers have been written on both sides of the issue. That is an important debate about climate.

So, the underlying point is that if we are to effectively discuss climate as a society, we have got to get beyond weather. Global warming proponents have got to quit bringing up the most recent heat wave or hurricane as definitely the result of a broader pattern, and global warming critics have got to quit bringing up the most recent cold snap or weird snow event as somehow proof that global warming isn't real.

The problem is, we're all used to thinking in terms of what it's doing wherever we are for single days or a few hours or minutes, not in large areas for decades-long chunks of time. So today's weather -- hot, cold, wet or dry -- is more important to us than what's happening over decades.

We can't do much to change the weather. Can we change the climate? That has become one of the hottest questions of our times.