Hurricane season is starting off with a bang, and climate experts have some serious concerns. The current storm on everyone's mind is Hurricane Beryl, which made landfall on the island of Carriacou in Grenada on July 1. It's not just Beryl itself, however, but what it signifies: As the hurricane makes its way through the Caribbean, meteorologists are warning that the storm is a bad omen of what's to come this season.
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Hurricane Beryl is now a Category 5 hurricane, according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC). This is the highest level on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, indicating that winds are reaching 157 miles per hour or higher, and catastrophic damage will occur.
"A high percentage of framed homes will be destroyed, with total roof failure and wall collapse. Fallen trees and power poles will isolate residential areas. Power outages will last for weeks to possibly months. Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks or months," the NHC explains on its website.
Intensifying into a Category 5 on Monday night after barreling through Carriacou, Hurricane Beryl is now the strongest Atlantic storm that has ever been seen during the month of July, The Washington Post reported. It went from being a tropical depression to a Category 4 hurricane in just 48 hours, which is the fastest any storm on record has strengthened before the month of September.
"What’s unusual about Beryl is not only how quickly it intensified, but it did it right from the beginning," John Cangialosi, NHC senior hurricane specialist, told The Wall Street Journal. "This is something we characteristically see during peak hurricane-formation season in August, September or October."
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As Brian McNoldy, a senior research associate at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Science, explained to the newspaper, Beryl was able to strengthen so quickly due to record warm sea-surface temperatures in the part of the Atlantic where hurricanes form.
The ocean's heat also allowed Beryl to form farther east in the Atlantic than typical June storms, breaking a record formed back in 1933, The New York Times reported.
While early-season hurricane activity doesn't always say much about what will happen throughout the rest of the season, activity occurring as far east as Beryl did this June is likely a bad omen of what's to come, according to Philip Klotzbach, an expert in seasonal hurricane forecasts at Colorado State University.
"This early-season storm activity is breaking records that were set in 1933 and 2005, two of the busiest Atlantic hurricane seasons on record," Klotzbach told The New York Times.
As a result, forecasters from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are already predicting that there will be 8 to 13 hurricanes this season, with about half of them reaching major hurricane status like Beryl, according to the newspaper.
