Saturday, July 14, 2007
Weather columnist Kevin Myatt: 2 Web sites provide fun for weather nerds
Kevin Myatt is The Roanoke Times' weather columnist.
kevin.myatt
@roanoke.com
981-3341
Weather with Kevin Myatt
Recent columns
- We got graupel, but not on official record
- Moisture could get caught up in cold blast
- Forecast for Weather Journal: Partly print, with frequent Internet
- Column archive
Read the Weather Journal blog
- For now, it looks like a quiet, mostly mild week ahead for SW Virginia
- Coldest morning of winter so far likely across much of Southwest Virginia; Tuesday precipitation looking doubtful
- UPDATE 8:45 AM, 2/11: Blustery winds for all, snowflakes for most, white ground for many, multiple inches for few
- Weather Journal blog
#swvawx on Twitter
@KevinMyattWx
"I'm Kevin, 37, and a weather nerd. Wanna fight about it?"
Well, I'm Kevin ... and I'm 37 ... and I guess I'm a weather nerd (though I would probably say "geek" instead of "nerd") ... but I'm not gonna fight about it. That biographical blurb on www.roanokevalleyweather.com isn't about me.
It refers to fellow weather enthusiast Kevin Ray, who has put together an extremely resourceful Web site for Roanoke-area weather.
Click on www.roanokevalleyweather.com, and you'll find an array of weather information from multiple sources, including current conditions from both official and unofficial recording stations, most prominently his own weather station at his home in northern Roanoke County.
One of the most interesting features allows you to click on National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration radio and hear it through your computer's speakers. That's another good way to know this site isn't mine: I wouldn't be able to figure out how to rig that on my own.
For Ray, it all began three years ago with the purchase of a home weather station. He created a Web site displaying the weather station data, then added new features until it became the one-stop shop for all things weather it is today.
"Before long, my Web site evolved into more of a public service venture, as I added forecasts, local watches and warnings, radar data, and other features publicly available elsewhere," Ray wrote in an e-mail. "I then started adding some more unique content, such as a weather webcam view of my neighborhood, the ability to view local weather data in real-time, local lightning detection, time-lapse video of today's weather (which I now archive), and a live rebroadcast of the local NOAA weather radio station in Roanoke."
Getting Ray to discuss area weather events that have had the most impact on him, ranging from the 1974 Roanoke tornado when he was a tyke to the big snowstorms of the 1990s, solidifies his weather geek credentials.
"Roanoke's all-time low of -11 occurred on January 21, 1985, and I spent the entire day on the 20th home from school charting the drop in temperatures after the cold front passed," Ray wrote. "The all-time high of 105 occurred during an outbreak of extreme heat in August 1985, and I spent the three hottest days watching my thermometer to see how high the temperature would get."
I suppose there's enough room in this valley for two 37-year-old weather-Kevins.
A different way to look at climate
Chip Konrad, a 1979 Northside High School and 1985 Virginia Tech graduate, was recently named the deputy director and regional climatologist for the Southeast Regional Climate Center.
Konrad even helped persuade the government to move the regional climate center from Columbia, S.C., to Chapel Hill, N.C., where he serves as an associate professor at the University of North Carolina.
Before that, he and graduate assistant Fan Chen, a Web programmer, created a unique climate resource on the Internet that includes data for Roanoke and eight other cities in Virginia and the Carolinas. The "Climate Perspectives for the Carolinas and Virginia" site generates climatic rankings daily for various periods of time, ranging from one day to 365 days.
For instance, Roanoke's precipitation in the past 60 days, 90 days and 180 days rank eighth, sixth and sixth lowest, respectively, among time spans of the same length in the past 58 years, according to the site on Thursday evening. No wonder we're teetering on the edge of a drought.
"Commonly reported climate stats are bound by the artificially imposed boundaries of months (e.g. January 1977 was the coldest month in Roanoke) and can therefore be misleading," Konrad wrote in an e-mail. "My Web site provides stats that are freed of this limitation."
In other words, a year is any consecutive 365-day period on the Web site, not a calendar year. Roanoke's warmest year on record officially is 1998, at 58.7 degrees. According to Konrad's Web site, the warmest year on record began on Sept. 20, 1991, and ended on Sept. 19, 1991, averaging 59.6 degrees.
The Web site's address is a little clunky so we've used a Web tool to shorten it to the address below:
You can also link to both Konrad's and Ray's Web sites by going to my Weather Journal blog.
