Hurricane Beryl’s explosive growth into an unprecedented early whopper of a storm shows the literal hot water the Atlantic and Caribbean are in right now and the kind of season they can expect, experts said. Beryl smashed various storm records even before its major hurricane level winds approached land. The powerful storm is acting more like monsters that form in the peak of hurricane season thanks mostly to water temperatures as hot or hotter than the region normally gets in September, five hurricane experts told The Associated Press.
Beryl set the record for earliest Category 4 with winds of at least 130 mph (209 kilometers per hour) — the first-ever category 4 in June. It also was the earliest storm to rapidly intensify with wind speeds jumping 63 mph (102 kph) in 24 hours, going from an unnamed depression to a Category 4 in 48 hours. Beryl is on an unusually southern path, especially for a major hurricane, said University at Albany atmospheric scientist Kristen Corbosiero.
It made landfall Monday on the island of Carriacou with winds of up to 150 mph (240 kph), just shy of a top Category 5 storm, and is expected to plow through the islands of the southeast Caribbean. “Beryl is unprecedentedly strange,” said Weather Underground co-founder Jeff Masters, a former government hurricane meteorologist who flew into storms. “It is so far outside the climatology that you look at it and you say, ‘How did this happen in June?’” Get used to it.
Forecasters it was goin.
