Skip to content
Link copied to clipboard

Record-setting Hurricane Beryl’s peak winds reach 165 mph, a Category 5 and a ‘warning shot’ for the season

Beryl became the earliest storm to generate 150 mph winds. It may be an omen for a season whose peak is still several weeks away.

Residents cover the windows of their home in preparation for the arrival of Hurricane Beryl in Bridgetown, Barbados, on Sunday.
Residents cover the windows of their home in preparation for the arrival of Hurricane Beryl in Bridgetown, Barbados, on Sunday.Read moreRamon Espinosa / AP
    by Anthony R. Wood
    Updated 
    Published 

In the Atlantic hurricane basin, it’s beginning to look a lot like August and September.

In what may be a “warning shot” for the season ahead, Hurricane Beryl, which formed on Saturday, matured into a monster on Monday with peak winds of 155 mph that grew to 165 mph on Tuesday.

That’s the earliest that an Atlantic hurricane had grown to such magnitutde in the period of record, said Philip Klotzbach, tropical storm expert at Colorado State University.

On Tuesday morning, the season’s first hurricane was centered about 300 miles southeast of the Dominican Republic, the National Hurricane Center said, and constituted ”an extremely dangerous and life-threatening situation.”

Hurricane warnings were up for Grenada, Barbados, and other Caribbean islands, and a hurricane watch for Jamaica. Beryl was moving westward on a path that eventually would take it toward Yucatán Peninsula.

Forecasters have been warning for months that this would be an ultra-busy season, citing unusually warm sea-surface temperatures and a lack of shearing winds that can rip apart incipient storms.

Already, three named storms — those with winds of at least 39 mph — have formed in the basin, which includes the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. A fourth is expected during the next week, the hurricane center says.

Ordinarily, the third named storm doesn’t appear until Aug. 11, and the first hurricane — one with winds of 74 mph — doesn’t form until Aug. 3.

Beryl’s precocious ripening “is a warning shot of what is likely to follow later on,” Klotzbach said.

The fact that Beryl appeared more than a month ahead of schedule isn’t the storm’s scariest characteristic, he said.

Early season activity isn’t always an indicator, he added, but the fact that Beryl formed so far east in the Atlantic and so deep in the tropics suggests that conditions are especially fertile for hurricanes, he added.

Ominously, it beat the record set by Hurricane Dennis for the earliest hurricane to generate 150 mph, he said. Dennis developed in the catastrophic 2005 season, the year of Katrina.

“Unfortunately, Beryl is breaking records that were set in 1933 and 2005 — two of the busiest Atlantic hurricane seasons on record.”