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Near-record sea surface temperatures across the Atlantic and a strong chance of a La Niña climate pattern taking hold are intensifying the risk of dangerous storms, the researchers said in a forecast.
Warm seas fuel hurricanes with additional heat and can allow them to intensify rapidly. La Niña is a natural pattern of ocean circulation that is associated with hurricane formation.
“All the conditions we normally see in August and September, we have earlier this year,” said Philip Klotzbach, a Colorado State meteorologist and Atlantic hurricane forecaster. “Beryl was quite the beast of a storm.”
He said it was unusual to have a strong hurricane form in the eastern Caribbean so early in the season.
“That’s quite unusual to get storms forming there this time of year,” Klotzbach said, noting that previous prominent hurricane years — including 1933 and 2005 — bore similar hallmarks.
Hurricane Beryl already etched its name into the record books as the first Category 4 storm to form in the Atlantic Ocean in June. It soon intensified and became a Category 5 storm — the earliest in the season that a hurricane of that strength has formed in the Atlantic Ocean.
