July 3, 2024
Several pieces of good news today I think. First, confidence is fairly high that Beryl will not be a threat to the northern Gulf of Mexico but it is possible that there could be some impacts to the lower or central Texas coast. The official forecast is below. After peaking as a 165 mph category 5 storm yesterday, Beryl has finally weakened some but is still a 145 mph category 4 storm. It is expected to bring significant impacts to Jamaica within the next few hours and then to the Cayman Islands later today and overnight. The storm is expected to continue to weaken but will still be a category 2 hurricane when it makes landfall somewhere on the Yucatan Peninsula on Friday. The NHC has Beryl weakening to tropical storm strength after landfall but then restrengthening to a category 1 hurricane in the Gulf before making another landfall along the coast of Mexico or Texas Sunday or Monday.
There is still some uncertainty regarding the strength of the storm and track in the Gulf. The best resource for details on this is the Tropical Tidbits video I've linked below, but briefly if Beryl doesn't weaken as much as expected and/or traverses the narrow northern portion of the Yucatan there is the possibility of stronger storm that tracks farther north along the Texas coast whereas the opposite situation would lead to a weaker storm that stays more to the south. Again, if you missed it, the good news is that us along the northern Gulf are very likely in the clear. One impact we will see, however, is that large swells from Beryl are expected to cause dangerous rip currents along the beaches starting as soon as tomorrow and over the weekend. By the way, Beryl set a record not only by becoming the earliest category 5 hurricane but is also the strongest July hurricane on record and the earliest storm (by over a month...) with 165 mph winds!
The second piece of good news is that Invest 96L behind Beryl is not expected to develop, at least not in the short term. Officially, it has a 20% chance of development over the next 7 days which is much lower than it was on Sunday. This makes sense because usually systems following another storm run into a hostile environment due to higher wind shear from the outflow of the leading storm. The leading storm usually causes the ocean to cool a bit in its wake so that helps as well. We shouldn't write it off altogether though. Several ensemble members show the system making another run at development once it reaches the western Caribbean or Gulf around Sunday or early next week, so that is something we need to watch. Right now it looks like anything that does develop will stay out of the northern Gulf, but it's possible that could change.
And now, the third piece of good news. It looks like once these two systems are out of the picture that the tropics will quiet down for several weeks as large scale conditions over the Atlantic basin become unfavorable for development. Right now this is only expected to last until the last week or week and a half of July but we'll see. Don't let the quiet period get your guard down as I'm concerned that the lull will just be priming the system for what could be a very busy August and September. So if you're keeping score, the good news is that we don't have a second Beryl roaring through the Caribbean and I think it's pretty likely that we will not see any impacts from tropical weather for the foreseeable future other than large waves and rip currents along the coast.
Here in the Southeast it is going to be typical July weather through the holiday weekend. In case you forgot, that means hot (ok, very hot) with a chance or rain on and off through the next week or so.
Happy Independence Day and stay safe.
Chris
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