Beryl marks a warning sign for this year’s hurricane season

Hurricane Beryl, which made landfall yesterday on the Caribbean island of Carriacou with wind speeds just shy of a Category 5 storm, is providing evidence to support weather forecasters’ worst-case scenarios for the 2024 hurricane season.

Let’s break it down: Hurricane Beryl has shattered records for rapid intensification and overall strength at this time of year.

• The storm took 42 hours to strengthen from a tropical depression to a major hurricane – a faster pace than all but six storms in Atlantic hurricane history, with those six all coming after September 1.
• Beryl is also the earliest Atlantic hurricane on record to intensify into a Category 4 storm, beating the previous early mark by nine days (based on data that stretches back 174 years).

From prediction to nonfiction

Experts mainly attribute Beryl’s historic strength and rapid intensification to the combination of record-hot Atlantic Ocean temperatures – part of a global spike that has lasted for 14 months – and a developing La Niña climate cooling cycle in the Pacific Ocean.

• These same conditions were used as the main evidence for earlier predictions from numerous private sector and university research groups – as well as the NOAA – indicating an extremely active Atlantic hurricane season through November.

👀 Looking ahead… The NOAA currently predicts between 17-25 named storms will emerge this season, including 8-13 hurricanes and 4-7 major hurricanes. An average season produces 14, 7, and 3, respectively.