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Experts say the explosive growth of Hurricane Beryl, an unprecedented storm, highlights the critical situation the Atlantic and Caribbean regions are in and the type of seasons to expect.
Even before hurricane-force winds approached land, Beryl broke multiple records. The powerful storm is more like a monster that forms at the height of hurricane season, largely because the current water temperatures are as high or higher than what the region typically reaches in September.
Beryl set the record for the season’s earliest Category 4 storm, with winds of at least 209 km/h (130 mph), and was the first Category 4 storm ever recorded in June. It was also the earliest storm to experience explosive growth, with winds increasing to 102 km/h (63 mph) in 24 hours, and developing from an unnamed depression to a Category 4 hurricane in 48 hours.
Kristen Corbosiero, an atmospheric scientist at the University at Albany, said Beryl is following an unusually southward path, especially for a high-intensity hurricane.
It made landfall on Carriacou Island on Monday with winds of up to 150 mph (240 kph), approaching a Category 5 storm and is expected to hit islands in the southeastern Caribbean.
“Beryl is something so bizarre that you’ve never heard of it before,” said Jeff Masters, a co-founder of Weather Underground and a former government hurricane meteorologist. “It’s so far removed from the weather that you look at it and say, ‘How can this happen in June?'”
Get used to it. Meteorologists predicted months ago that this would be a tough year, and now they are comparing it to the record set in 1933 and deadly 2005, the year of Katrina, Rita, Wilma and Dennis.
“This is the kind of storms we expect to see this year, these atypical things happening when and where they shouldn’t be happening,” said Brian McNoldy, a tropical climate researcher at the University of Miami. “Not only will things form and intensify and reach greater intensity, but the likelihood of rapid intensification will increase. “It’s all coming together now, and it won’t be the last.”
Phil Klotzbach, a hurricane researcher at Colorado State University, called the beryl “a potential harbinger of more interesting things to come.” “It’s not that the beryl itself isn’t interesting, but it could mean that there are going to be more threats and more of these storms in the future, and not just one, but several.”
The water temperature around Beryl was 1 to 2 degrees Celsius (2 to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal, at 29 °C (84 °F), “which would have been great if it was a hurricane,” Klotzbach said.
Warmer waters fuel the storms and clouds that form hurricanes. The warmer the water, the warmer the air at the base of the storm, and the more likely it is to reach higher in the atmosphere and create deeper storms, said UAlbany’s Cobocillo.
Sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic and Caribbean Seas were “above average September temperatures (seasonal peaks) for the past 30 years,” Masters said.
It’s not just the warm water on the surface that’s important. Ocean heat content — a measure of the deeper water needed to continue to nourish storms — is well above record levels for this time of year and should also be peaking in September, McNoldy said.
“So when you get all that heat, you can expect some fireworks,” Masters said.
Additionally, there is a significant difference between water temperatures and upper air temperatures in the tropics this year.
The greater the difference, the more likely a storm will form and get bigger, said Kerry Emanuel, a hurricane expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Compared to other tropical areas, this is the warmest I’ve ever seen in the Atlantic,” he said.
Atlantic waters have been unusually warm since March 2023 and have been record-breaking since April 2023. Klotzbach said a high-pressure system that normally generates the trade winds collapsed at the time and has not recovered.
Cobocillo noted that scientists are debating exactly how climate change affects hurricanes, but there is consensus that climate change makes it more likely that rapid intensification like Beryl occurred and increases the number of the strongest storms, like Beryl.
Emanuel believes that the slowdown in Atlantic ocean currents could be caused by climate change and could also be a factor in warming ocean waters.
The arrival of La Nina, a slight cooling of the Pacific Ocean that changes climate around the world, may also have played a role. Experts say La Nina tends to reduce the high-altitude crosswinds that cause hurricanes.
La Nina also typically means more hurricanes in the Atlantic and fewer in the Pacific. In the eastern Pacific, there were no tropical storms in May and June, which has only happened twice before, Klotzbach said.
Globally, the incidence of tropical cyclones this year is likely to be below average (except in the Atlantic).
Beryl underwent an eyewall replacement Sunday night, which typically weakens a storm while a new center forms, Cobocillo said. But now the storm is back in force.
“This is our worst-case scenario,” he said. “We started out early with some pretty severe storms … Unfortunately, it seems to be developing the way we expected it to.”
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Borenstein is known in X as @borenbears
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