Nature
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The first hurricane of this year’s Atlantic season is certainly making a name for itself, with Beryl now having strengthened to become the earliest Category 5 Atlantic hurricane on record.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.As of 5am AST, the National Hurricane Center reported that Beryl had maximum sustained winds of 270 kilometers (165 miles) per hour, with even higher gusts, taking it firmly into the highest category for hurricane strength.
While forecasters are predicting that the hurricane may well weaken later today, they’ve also said that is “quite an uncertain forecast” and that Beryl is likely to remain a “powerful” hurricane as it progresses across the Caribbean Sea over this week.
Major hurricanes – Category 3 or higher – such as Beryl are well known for the catastrophic damage they can cause, which has already been seen in the regions hit by the storm on Monday.
Several countries in the Caribbean have thousands of residents living without power and forced into temporary accommodation after severe damage to houses. At least one person from St Vincent and the Grenadines is reported to have died.
Beryl is now continuing its journey toward Jamaica, which has been placed under a hurricane warning and is expected to see potentially life-threatening winds, heavy rainfall, and flash flooding on Wednesday.
While the Atlantic hurricane season runs all the way from June 1 through to November 30, the first named hurricane usually forms in early to mid-August, and the first major hurricane between late August and early September.
Hurricane Beryl has already gone against the grain in both cases. First, it formed in late June – Friday 28 specifically, from a tropical storm. Second, it rapidly reached major hurricane status; on Sunday, its powerful winds took it into Category 4, making it the earliest storm of that strength to form in the Atlantic on record, and now the same for Category 5.
“Hurricanes don’t know what month it is, they only know what their ambient environment is,” hurricane expert Jim Kossin told CNN. “Beryl is breaking records for the month of June because Beryl thinks it’s September.”
The strength of the hurricane – and the predicted “extraordinary” rest of the season – is largely thought to be down to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, with the powerful, water-warming El Niño phase now making way for hurricane-fueling La Niña conditions.
Together with the impact of climate change, and having already seen a decade of increasingly ferocious storms, some scientists are now arguing that authorities should introduce a new class of hurricane: Category 6.
