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If you haven't gotten in your Halloween activities yet, you're probably going to get soaked if it involves being outdoors the rest of this evening. A large area of rain moving out of West Virginia will soon overtake the area. While we saw some showers earlier, this will be a much more widespread and heavier rain ... though not a torrential one. Most places in our region are expected to get 1/2 to 1 inch. Once this rain pushes out, the week ahead looks like a treat, with dry weather, cool mornings and warm days. A prolonged period of mild to warm and dry weather may be in the offing the next 10 days or so ... but last week's projected dryness was spoiled by a storm that fired in the Gulf. We'll just have to see if there are any spoiler this week.

Today in my Weather Journal column I gave a few of my thoughts about the winter ahead.

(By the way, I intended to predict a first snow on Dec. 13 for Roanoke, not Dec. 3 as was published. However, since it published that way, I am stuck with that as my pick. As it's published, I actually picked an earlier date for Roanoke to get a 1-inch snow than Blacksburg, by one day, which I would not have done.)

But today is also the first day I'm taking entries for the snowfall prediction contest, now in its second year. Austin Broyles of Lord Botetourt High School won last year's contest, with school kids completely dusting the adults for the top spots.

The instructions to enter are below.

(1) You must give the following information to be entered:

Your name

City or town of residence (nearest town or section of county if rural). School affiliation is OK for students.

Projected date of first 1-inch snow in Roanoke, as reported by the official snowfall measuring station at WDBJ (Channel 7) studio.

Predicted total inches (rounded to nearest whole number) of snowfall between Nov. 15 and April 15 in Roanoke.

Projected date of first 1-inch snow in Blacksburg, as reported by the National Weather Service office.

Predicted total inches (rounded to the nearest whole number) of snowfall between Nov. 15 and April 15 in Blacksburg.

(2) E-mail above information to weather@roanoke.com before the end of Friday, Nov. 6. Entries will not be accepted after midnight on Nov. 7.

(3) Each entrant’s score will be calculated by adding the number of inches off each snowfall seasonal prediction and the number of days off the first 1-inch snow predictions. The lowest score wins.

It is OK to send multiple people’s entries on one e-mail, such as a family or a classroom. It is also OK to send an attachment … such as a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet … with many individual entries, as long as you identify the group they are coming from (such as a school).

The first 1-inch snow means the date on which there is at least 1 inch of snow on the ground. That means that if it snows nine-tenths of an inch before midnight on Dec. 12 and one-tenth of an inch after midnight on Dec. 13, Dec. 13 is the date that will count.

We are using official statistics, which means that sleet also counts as snowfall. If there is an inch of sleet, it counts as a 1-inch snowfall whether or not there are any snowflakes mixed in, because it will be recorded as an inch of snowfall in official records. Glaze ice from freezing rain does not count as snowfall.

Winter is getting an early start in the Rockies and High Plains, where "the biggest snowmaker to hit Colorado's Front Range in October since 1997" is under way. Click here to read the Associated Press article. This same powerhouse low could become a severe weather producer the next couple of days  and also spread more heavy rain through the central U.S. It will pull a Pacific cool front through our region by the weekend, triggering a few showers around Halloween.

There appear to be no ... wet extremes anywhere on the horizon.

What dummy put these words on his blog Saturday ... oh yeah, it was me, and I was taunted by it today with 13 hours of rain on a 13 hour, 20-minute drive from Arkansas to Virginia Tuesday.

It just goes to show you that we are in the time of year when you can't take your eyes off the pattern even for a day or two. What looked like a fairly weak disturbance a few days ago ended up spinning up a strong low that has spread Gulf of Mexico moisture northward, creating a rainy Tuesday over much of the East.

If this is a sign of the El Nino-driven winter ahead ... and this kind of wet storm is very El Nino-like ... we'll have lots of interesting things to watch in the weeks and months ahead -- though many of them may just be wet like this.

Kevin is driving through soggy Tennessee on his way back to Virginia today. He will be back Wednesday to talk about how this week's weather has defied expectations.

-- Erica Myatt

Getting past Saturday morning's showers, the advancing cool front is going to clear the way for a pretty classic late October week ... highs in the 60s, lows in the 40s, lots of sunshine and little rain. Sunday should be a good day for some leaf-peeping, as will much of the rest of the week, if you can make it out. There appear to be no hot, cold or wet extremes anywhere on the horizon.

A cold front pushing into our region and low pressure to our northwest is likely to trigger rainfall, especially tonight (sorry, high school football fans). This morning's rainfall projection map from the Hydrometeorological Prediction Center forecasts the potential for about an inch of rain in much Western Virginia through the next 48 hours. It might be just warm enough (in the 60s) that this front could even trigger a few thunderstorms with gusty winds. The first half of Saturday look soggy too, but rain should start to diminish into the afternoon. This front is more of a "cool" front than a cold one, as temperatures will cool down but not return to last week's frosty/mountain snow flurry levels, at least for the next few days.

Atlantic hurricane season officially stretches until the end of November, but the 2009 season seems to be over with barely a whimper.

The most interesting event of the hurricane season on this blog was our discussion on Aug. 22 (and several days following) about proposals to use cold water upwelling to potentially weaken hurricanes. Reporter Duncan Adams wrote an extensive article about such a proposal from The Egg Factory of Roanoke, filed in 2000.

The discussion veered from whether such a thing was technically possible to more a philosophical question of whether man should even attempt such a thing. The critics of the plan generally said that man shouldn't tamper with nature and that doing so could produce unintended bad consequences. Supporters favored the hurricane-weakening proposals as a way to save lives and property damage along our coasts.

A few of you asked me to give some thoughts, which I have in the Weather Journal column that appears Friday in The Roanoke Times.

In the extended entry below (click "Read More" in full blog mode) is a short e-mail interview I had with George Hagerman, the Egg Factory's hurricane expert, about the group's proposal and its potential effects.

Feel free to weigh in again with your own comments, whether you have before or not -- just keep it civil.

Read more »

Highs of 76 in Blacksburg and 78 in Roanoke today were well above the normal highs for this date of 63 and 67, respectively, but fell well short of the record highs of 81 for Blacksburg (1993) and 85 for Roanoke (1941). The morning started just a degree above freezing in Blacksburg at 33, 3 degrees below normal, and 42 at Roanoke, only a degree below normal.

We'll see a similar day on Thursday, though the cool start will be about 5 to 8 degrees warmer. 

Rain and cooler weather is still on the way over the weekend. A little further down the road, the 6-to-10 day and 8-to-14 day temperature maps from the Climate Prediction Center depict the progessive pattern well, as cooler than normal temperatures expand from the central U.S. early next week toward the east later in the week.

The timing isn't working out for anyone who wants a sunny Saturday. The sunny, warm days will be today and Thursday ... highs in the 70s, generally, after cool mornings in the 40s. Rain returns Friday with the next cold front -- Friday night football games look to be soggy right now -- lingering into Saturday.  Sunday, though, looks like it may be nice with sunshine, highs in the 60s, lows in the 40s, perhaps a good leaf-peeping day.

This is a result of the progressive jet stream pattern we are in, with fronts pushed across the nation about every 5 days, a few days warmup followed by a cooldown. For now, it appears most of the fronts are of Pacific origin, so no extreme chill-outs are likely. Very typical October weather.