Hurricane Beryl has smashed records on its path of destruction from the Caribbean to the Gulf Coast.
On Sunday, the tropical storm became the first Category 4 hurricane to ever form in the Atlantic Ocean in the month of June. By July 2, Beryl rapidly intensified with winds reaching 165 miles per hour at its peak, marking its transition to Category 5—and setting the record for the earliest Atlantic storm in history to reach this strength.
Research shows that Atlantic hurricanes are more quickly strengthening from weaker storms into supercharged cyclones—and climate change has likely played a part. While forecasters can chart when and where a hurricane like Beryl might hit, this “rapid intensification” is notoriously difficult to predict.
Now, scientists are rushing to refine models to more accurately forecast when tropical storms are expected to explode in strength—and how to help communities better prepare.
The Eye of the Storm: On Monday morning, Hurricane Beryl made landfall in Grenada and “flattened” the nearby island of Carriacou in half an hour, Grenada Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell said in a briefing broadcast on social media. Throughout the week, the storm has killed at least 10 people, destroyed homes and triggered floods and power outages along its path, which included Jamaica on Wednesday and Mexico this morning.
Though it eventually weakened to a Category 2 storm, Beryl’s initial strength was unusual for a storm so early in the season, according to Brian Tang, a professor of atmospheric science at the University at Albany.
“I think a lot of us are surprised by just how intense it was able to get,” he told me. Rapid intensification occurs when a hurricane’s wind speed increases by at least 35 mph over a 24-hour period—a metric Beryl far surpassed when winds picked up dramatically at the beginning of the week.
“It intensified because the conditions in the Caribbean right now look like middle September, basically the peak of the hurricane season,” Tang said.
Warm ocean water is the main factor fueling a hurricane of this caliber. As a whole, ocean temperatures have been running much higher than normal for an extended period of time. (June 26 marked the first time in 469 days that a new daily record was not set for global sea surface temperatures, Heatmap News reports.) In the Caribbean, water temperatures are currently around 84 degrees or warmer—more similar to what they would typically be in September—giving Hurricane Beryl plenty of heat energy to suck up in its path of destruction.
Other environmental conditions need to fall into place for rapid intensification to occur like it did with Beryl.
“The winds basically steering the storm need to be fairly uniform through the whole depth of the storm, and that allows the storm to remain upright in the vortex, to really spin up, without it being interfered with,” said Tang. “The atmosphere around Beryl, particularly when it started rapidly intensifying, was quite moist, and that also allowed it to develop those thunderstorms around the center.”
He added: “It’s hauntingly beautiful when you look at it from a satellite image, but it’s also the signature of an extremely violent storm.”
As climate change accelerates, these types of warm and wet conditions are more common, which could trigger additional rapid intensifications during hurricane season.
This process won’t transform every hurricane. But the odds of rapid intensification are likely increasing, Tang said, because climate change “is loading the dice.”
Forecasting Intensity: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) forecasts the path of a hurricane using models that pull weather and ocean data from satellites, ships, buoys, radar and reconnaissance aircrafts known as “hurricane hunters.” (The New York Times’ Austyn Gaffney recently spoke to a hurricane hunter about what it’s like to fly into Hurricane Beryl, if you’re interested in learning more.)
However, predicting rapid intensification is a bit more complicated, Tang said. Models have to incorporate the environment around the storm and within it. The anatomy of a hurricane is more layered than it may look from the ground: The relatively calm eye of the storm is surrounded by a region of violent winds, thunderstorms and heavy rain known as the eyewall. Branching outward, curved “rainbands” of clouds and thunderstorms with varying levels of intensity spiral from the center.
Along with trying to predict the location and strength of these hurricane parts, models also need to represent the physics of how the atmosphere is interacting with the ocean, Tang said.
“All those things have to be represented well in models, but they also have to kind of talk to one another well in order to get everything right,” he told me.
With an unusually active hurricane season on the horizon, getting things right will be critical. Last summer, NOAA officially deployed one of its newest models to help produce hurricane forecasts—dubbed the Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System (HAFS)—which the agency says is better at predicting rapid intensification than past models.
The experimental version was the first model to accurately predict in 2022 that Hurricane Ian would undergo secondary rapid intensification as the storm moved off the coast of Cuba before slamming into southwest Florida.
“To better capture the details of hurricanes, [HAFS] uses higher model resolution in an area around the storm center,” William Ramstrom, a senior software engineer at University of Miami who works with NOAA, said in an interview on the university’s website. “The effect is akin to the benefit we see with the increase in megapixels in our phone cameras—smaller details are more accurately captured.”
Another model known as SDCON was launched in June to further help predict when a hurricane might jump in intensity, and is in operational use by the National Hurricane Center for the first time this season. However, scientists note there is still room for improvement, as none of the hurricane models—including HAFS—accurately predicted the severe intensity of Hurricane Otis when it made landfall last October in Acapulco, Mexico.
Tang is currently working on multiple projects, funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation, to improve models of hurricane intensity by comparing them to actual observations of hurricanes. By refining these forecasts, scientists and government officials can help areas prepare for how strong a hurricane like Beryl will be before it makes landfall.
“Residents can know what actions to take. Do they need to board up their property? Do they themselves need to evacuate?” Tang said. “And if that all has to be done in a rush within a short amount of time frame, it’s just chaos.”
More Top Climate News
Thousands of people have evacuated their homes in Northern California this week as wildfires burn in tinderbox conditions worsened by heat waves, NBC News reports. California’s fire agency notes that it’s responding to more than 3,000 wildfires across the state. Many of those are small, but a handful have already burned more than 1,000 acres, including the Thompson Fire about 60 miles north of Sacramento.
Meanwhile, a new study found that New Jersey is the fastest-warming state in the Northeast, with annual temperatures up by about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970. The uptick is largely due to overdevelopment and warming ocean temperatures from climate change, The New York Times reports. In 2021, the state also earned a different climate-related superlative, with the fastest rate of sea level rise on the East Coast. Oh, I forgot to mention parts of New Jersey are rapidly sinking, too.
“New Jersey is ground zero for some of the worst impacts of climate change, including extreme heat and considerable increases in flood risk,” Shawn M. LaTourette, the commissioner of New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection, told the Times.
In other news, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday that General Motors will pay a penalty of nearly $146 million because of the excess emissions released by 5.9 million vehicles still on the road that did not comply with fuel economy standards when they were made. Recent testing revealed that those GM pickup trucks and SUVs release 10 percent more carbon emissions on average than their initial compliance testing showed, The Associated Press reports.
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Kiley Price is a reporter at Inside Climate News, with a particular interest in wildlife, ocean health, food systems and climate change. She writes ICN’s “Today’s Climate” newsletter, which covers the most pressing environmental news each week.
She earned her master’s degree in science journalism at New York University, and her bachelor’s degree in biology at Wake Forest University. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Time, Scientific American and more. She is a former Pulitzer Reporting Fellow, during which she spent a month in Thailand covering the intersection between Buddhism and the country’s environmental movement.
