A week ago in this space, with plenty of photos to illustrate it , it was mentioned that our region had experienced “three seasons in a week.”
The fourth season showed up on Monday.
A burst of summerlike heat came four days after the year’s first confirmed tornado and many reports of wind damage across Southwest and Southside Virginia, three days after some high-elevation snow and a house-threatening wildfire driven by gusty winds, and scarcely a week after many locations experienced subfreezing temperatures, as low as 19 at Burke’s Garden in Tazewell County on Sunday, April 7.
On Monday, South Boston almost became the first location to reach 90 this year, topping out at 89 for the warmest temperature in our region.
A closeup of the total solar eclipse over northern Arkansas on April 8, with the corona and a couple of red solar flares visible. Photo by Erica Myatt.
Twice in a lifetime: My journey to totality, 7 years after the first.
Monday’s high of 88 and low of 67 at Roanoke made for a perfectly normal daily temperature range — for late July. Lynchburg also hit 88, both locations just a degree shy of record highs for April 15, dating to the 1930s and early 1940s. Most locations in our region besides the higher elevations topped out above 80 degrees.
Through April 15, 2024 is off to another warm start historically in our region, though not as warm as how its predecessor started.
2023 through April 15 was the warmest on record at Roanoke, Lynchburg and Danville, and second warmest at Blacksburg. By comparison, 2024 through April 15 ranks third warmest at Roanoke, 12 th warmest at Lynchburg, tied for 15 th warmest at Danville, and tied for 16 th warmest at Blacksburg, each location with more than a century of official weather records.
Temperatures are due for a cooldown from recent summerlike heat to below-normal levels next week over much of the East, including Virginia, according to National Weather Service forecasts. Courtesy of Weather Prediction Center | NOAA.
Globally, March was the 10 th month in a row with the highest global average temperature, dating to the late 1800s. Large-scale climate change doesn’t ensure that any particular day, season, or year will be the warmest (or even above average) for a specific region or locality, but it is contributing in making temperatures on the warmer end of historical averages more frequent at most locations.
While many locations in our region may top 80 on Wednesday, don’t get too used to the summerlike warmth just yet. A cold front will bring much cooler weather by the weekend into next week with lots of 40s lows to start the week, possibly a few frostier temperatures in some places a morning or two.
Trees were twisted down by an EF-1 tornado south of Swansonville in Pittsylvania County. Courtesy of National Weather Service.
Region’s first tornado of 2024 confirmed
Thursday, April 11, brought the spring’s first tornado watch across our region, as well as a few tornado warnings. But, thus far, there has been only one tornado confirmed by the National Weather Service.
Just south of Swansonville in Pittsylvania County, weather service surveyors confirmed a mile-long, 250-yard-wide path of an EF-1 tornado with 100-107 mph winds. The Enhanced Fujita Scale ranges from EF-0 for tornadoes with winds as low as 65 mph that do minor damage on roof shingles to EF-5 tornadoes with winds over 200 mph that completely sweep well-constructed buildings off foundations and scatter their debris.
“Numerous large softwood and hardwood trees were snapped or uprooted, with large branches broken,” the weather service reported. “Damaged trees were noted on both sides of Strawberry Creek Lane, and several trees had fallen across the road. Many trees had also been snapped and uprooted in a densely wooded area adjacent to Strawberry Creek Lane.”
Fortunately, no structures were damaged, and no one was injured.
National Weather Service surveyors look for a debris pattern suggesting convergence — trees, for instance, generally pulled to the middle or left of the damage path — rather than divergence, or debris blown outward or parallel to the damage path, when distinguishing between tracks of tornadoes and straight-line or microburst winds.
There were plenty of other reports of wind damage across our region on Thursday as a line of thunderstorms moved east and northeastward out of northwest North Carolina into Southside and Central Virginia. Shifting winds aloft caused many storm cells to rotate, but thus far, only the Pittsylvania storm and a couple more in North Carolina have been determined to have developed a rapidly rotating updraft column all the way to the surface.
A wildfire burns on Twelve O’Clock Knob, south of Salem in Roanoke County, on March 19. Photo by Kevin Myatt.
Picking up where we left off with autumn wildfires.
This wasn’t really supposed to be on the early 2024 bingo card starting the year with a strong El Niño.
The warm stripe of equatorial Pacific waters commonly leads to a soggy winter, which was pretty much the case in December and January, as enough rain fell on Virginia to entirely extinguish a monthslong drought that reached extreme levels briefly in some of the Shenandoah Valley and was moderate to severe over most of the western two-thirds of the state.
We figured to be done with large wildfires for a while, after the big ones of November .
But February and March, while not absolutely arid, came up short of normal rainfall in most of the western half of our region. Combined with some windy fronts, that was enough to allow surface fuels to dry out for a few rounds of scattered wildfires in March .
Green areas reflect where winter rainfall improved prior dry conditions. Courtesy of National Drought Mitigation Center.
Late last week, homes were evacuated near Shawsville in Montgomery County as gusty winds stirred a 320-acre wildfire . Fortunately, the fire turned away from homes and crews quickly contained the blaze.
High-elevation snow creates Western-like snowcapped mountain scenes in the Whitetop Mountain-Mount Rogers area on April 4. Some high elevations also saw snow showers a week later on Friday, April 12. Courtesy of Bill Bowling.
It would not be utterly shocking if there is some higher elevation snow somewhere in North Carolina, Virginia or (especially) West Virginia sometime next week.
Which brings me back to the fact that I haven’t graded the snowfall prediction contest yet, which ended March 31, having been focused on eclipse travel early in April.
Look for the results of that here in the near future. (You’ll be contacted sooner if you won or almost did.)
Journalist Kevin Myatt has been writing about weather for 20 years. His weekly column, appearing on Wednesdays, is sponsored by Oakey’s, a family-run, locally owned funeral home with locations throughout the Roanoke Valley.
Shelley Gelbert of Riner captured this double rainbow as showers and storms pulled eastward on Thursday, April 11. Gelbert had returned from Dayton, Ohio, where she caught a photo of the April 8 total solar eclipse that appears in this week’s recap article . Courtesy of Shelley Gelbert.
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