Posted on 07/02/2024 1:24:56 PM PDT by Red Badger
The hurricane already hit Grenada, St. Vincent, and the Grenadines with venom, and now encroaches on Jamaica.
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Hurricane Beryl over the Caribbean. Image: NASA
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Hurricane Beryl was upgraded to a Category 5 storm earlier today, making it the earliest storm to hit the heavy-hitting benchmark on record. The storm’s winds peaked at a staggering 160 miles per hour (258 km/hr) as it continued its northwesterly course across the Caribbean.
Philip Klotzbach, a meteorologist at Colorado State University, stated on X that the previous record-holder was Hurricane Emily, which hit Category 5 status on July 17, 2005. According to The New York Times, Beryl will remain at least a Category 3 storm as it moves towards Jamaica.
Unfortunately, Beryl’s expeditious intensity is not unexpected. In May, the National Weather Service predicted “above-normal” hurricane activity for the season, which runs from June 1 through November 30. Those months approximate the timeframe in which the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico tend to warm up, providing the conditions for massive storm systems to form over their waters.
NWS forecasters predicted up to 25 named storms for the season, four to seven of which were predicted to form major hurricanes, or storms with winds greater than 111 miles per hour (178.64 kilometers per hour). Category 5 storms are those with winds that exceed 157 mph (252 km/hr).
Beryl is the second named storm this year after Tropical Storm Alberto, which petered out in late June after dumping rain across coastal Mexico and Texas. Beryl is expected to enter the Gulf of Mexico by the weekend, though it’s not clear whether it will maintain its current intensity by the time it passes Jamaica.
Life-threatening winds and storm surge are expected in Jamaica on Wednesday as Beryl continues to move west just south of Hispaniola. Jamaica is (obviously) under a hurricane warning, and NWS stated a tropical storm warning is in effect for the Cayman Islands and southwestern Haiti.
A paper published earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences proposed revising the Saffir-Simpson scale for hurricane categories to include a sixth category, to account for storms becoming more extreme as ocean temperatures warm. Though it’s hard to draw an explicit link between climate change and extreme weather, warming ocean temperatures and increased moisture in the air provide favorable conditions for more intense hurricanes.
“We expected that climate change was going to make the winds of the most intense storms stronger,” Michael Wehner, a coauthor of the paper and an extreme weather researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, told Grist at the time. “What we’ve demonstrated here is that, yeah, it’s already happening. We tried to put numbers on how much worse it’ll get.”
The team concluded that “a number of recent storms have already achieved this hypothetical category 6 intensity” and based on their models “more such storms are projected as the climate continues to warm.”
With the earliest Category 5 storm on record now whipping its way across the Atlantic, we’d better hunker down. The next few months are primed to be a doozy.
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Is there nothing climate change can’t do? Just wait until they put that 30 million acre wind farm up in the gulf. Talk about gumming up the water......
Is the named storm after Beryl going to be Lium?
Overall, the last 10 years have had fewer than average hurricanes.
I do appreciate them actually saying “in recorded history” instead of the usual terminology.
Recorded history is a useless base
We will survive.
nice tight eye wall. A+
“not good”
So, hurricanes in and of themselves are not bad. Just when they are early.
Tell those Jamaicans that it’s a terrible thing that they have to suffer a category 5 hurricane before July 17th. If only it could have waited it’s turn. It would have been perfectly fine to have a Cat5 storm in August though.
And that recorded history is since the Galveston hurricane of 1900. Not an extensive history.
Yes, that is the Inconvienent Truth about hurricanes/Typhoons.
There have been much less than average for the last twenty years.
HOWEVER, I still would not want to be on Jamaica. There are still a lot of places in the Caribbean that have not been repaired since hurricane Maria hit the islands as a category 5 in 2017.
The leftidiots will blame Climate Change or Trump. The reality is we are dealing with a “solar maximum.” Has to do with how Jupiter aligns with the Earth and the Sun (this is VERY simplified). But even basic astrophysics is so beyond leftidiots its ridiculous. Just like basic economics and international policy is beyond them.
We treat the world like nothing of importance or note happened before about 1945. Entire fleets have been sunk by storms, probably record storms. But since we didn’t have a way of categorizing, it’s as if it never happened. Do you think the Mongol fleet that was going to invade Japan, or the Spanish Armada were sunk by CAT 3 storms? Probably not.
A storm in the Pacific in WWII sank US destroyers. Here’s an excerpt from a writeup on that.
“The Navy Department Library
Typhoons and Hurricanes: Pacific Typhoon at Okinawa, October 1945
On 4 October 1945, a typhoon was spotted developing in the Caroline Islands and tracked as it moved on a predictable course to the northwest. Although expected to pass into the East China Sea north of Formosa on 8 October, the storm unexpectedly veered north toward Okinawa. That evening the storm slowed down and, just as it approached Okinawa, began to greatly increase in intensity. The sudden shift of the storm caught many ships and small craft in the constricted waters of Buckner Bay (Nakagusuku Wan) and they were unable to escape to sea. On 9 October, when the storm passed over the island, winds of 80 knots (92 miles per hour) and 30-35 foot waves battered the ships and craft in the bay and tore into the quonset huts and buildings ashore. A total of 12 ships and craft were sunk, 222 grounded, and 32 severely damaged. [for listing of vessels] Personnel casualties were 36 killed, 47 missing, and 100 seriously injured. “
Now a CAT 4 max sustained winds 155mph.
485 miles from Jamaica.
Slight weakening forcast very dangerous storm .
Did they change the trajectory? Last I saw I thought it was going to stay south of Jamaica, hit Mexico as a cat 1.
Sometimes the storms actually save people:
Kamikaze (the devine wind that saved Japan from the Mongol invasion TWICE!
On August 15-16, 1281, a typhoon struck the Japanese home island of Kyushu, sinking and scattering a Mongolian fleet bent on invading Japan. A previous invasion effort by Kublai Khan seven years before had met a similar fate. This time the typhoon raged for two days, and many ships of the invasion fleet were flat-bottomed barges ill-suited to rough sea conditions. An estimated 4000 ships were destroyed with the loss of 100,000 soldiers.
The Japanese saw divine intervention in these two storms and called them “kami kaze” (神風) or “divine wind”. During World War II, the nickname “kamikaze” was applied to Japanese suicide pilots in the hopes that they would repel the American fleets as the typhoons had done with Kublai Khan’s.
Just south of Jamaica but almost direct hit going to be bad.
Is there any indication that it could head for Louisiana?
But the party of slavery in the U.S. wants their cult followers to believe that slavery here was some kind of unprecedented thing.
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