Hurricane Beryl, which devastated islands in Grenada on Tuesday and is now heading toward Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, has broken records as the first hurricane ever to reach Category 4 and Category 5 intensities in the Atlantic Basin. Wind speeds of at least 160 miles per hour were measured on Monday.
“There are so many superlatives to describe Hurricane Beryl, given the time of year, its location and its strength,” said Jonathan Zawislak, meteorologist and flight director for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Dr. Zawislak is a hurricane hunter, the title of about 30 to 40 scientists, data crunchers and pilots based in Lakeland, Florida, who fly into hurricanes with three planes nicknamed Gonzo, Kermit and Miss Piggy. Both Kermit and Miss Piggy are equipped with Doppler radar on their bellies and tails that scientists use to create 3D images of the storm.
Over the past three days, Dr. Zawislak and his team took off in Kermit from St. Croix, one of the U.S. Virgin Islands, and navigated through Hurricane Beryl’s swirling eyewall. In a Category 4 or 5 storm like Beryl, the eyewall — the ring of thunderstorms, heavy rain and dangerous winds around the center of the storm — is loud and bumpy.
“It’s like being on a roller coaster at a car wash, only you don’t know when the ups and downs will happen, or what the next turn will be,” said Dr. Zawislak Tuesday as he prepared for his third Beryl reconnaissance flight.
But the eye of the storm is calm. During daytime flights, Dr. Zawislak looks out his bubble window from behind the cockpit and sees a calm bowl of clouds with a clear, blue sky above.
His job is to navigate the chaos, find the path for Kermit to fly between 2,000 and 3,000 feet while maintaining an airspeed of exactly 210 knots and fly the plane directly into the wind so they don’t are pushed around.
Jonathan Shannon, spokesman for NOAA’s Aircraft Operations Center, said the purpose of these flights, especially during rapidly changing hurricanes, was to provide better data to better prepare for emergencies.
Since Dr.’s first flight. Zawislak on Sunday, Hurricane Beryl experienced rapid intensification, meaning wind speeds increased by 55 miles per hour or more in a 24-hour period. Part of the change came from an eye wall replacement cycle, or what Dr. Zawislak called it the “skater effect”: the storm contracts like a figure skater pulling his arms in tight as he spins. The storm draws energy from warm ocean water, replaces the old eye with a new eye and reorganizes the outer wall.
As Earth’s atmosphere warms, more storms undergo this kind of rapid intensification. A recent study found that rapid intensification is now twice as likely for Atlantic hurricanes, due at least in part to human-induced climate change from the burning of fossil fuels.
Beryl is a disastrous start to what Hosmay Lopez, an oceanographer at NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, said was the “most optimistic” forecast the agency has ever made for an Atlantic hurricane season. NOAA predicts an above-normal hurricane season with four to seven major storms with winds exceeding 110 miles per hour.
The forecast is based on the change in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, a natural climate pattern associated with warmer conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean, moving from a neutral state to La Niña. The calm conditions caused by La Niña, combined with abnormally warm ocean temperatures, increase the chance of an Atlantic hurricane forming.
As they travel, hurricanes stir the surface of the ocean. They stir in colder water from deep below the surface, which can dilute the storm’s energy, much like stirring a cup of coffee to cool it. But in addition to the exceptionally warm sea surface temperatures, which have been breaking records for over a year, temperatures at greater depths are also higher than normal.
“In this case, the cup of coffee is very high, so it is very difficult to mix cold water from below even if there is a strong wind,” said Dr. Lopez. Warmer temperatures at greater depths give the storm even more energy to move out of the ocean, he said.
The hurricane season, which lasts from June 1 to November 30, has historically been quiet in June and July before picking up again in August. Hurricane Beryl beat the previous record holder for the first Category 5 storm, Hurricane Emily in 2005, by about two weeks.
