Vermont resident for 42 years and I’ve never noticed a hurricane behave this way. Sure, every decade or two we’ll get one that’ll ride up the east coast and cause problems for New England…
But for one to strike the gulf coast, ride all the way up (over land!) to the northeast and still drop 4-6” of rain, is something I can’t wrap my head around.
I’m used to storms hitting the south and then breaking up rather quickly over land. What was so different about Beryl?
I’m just curious, this is the 2nd 100-year flood we’ve had in back-to-back years, right down to the day… it’s crazy…
In: Planetary Science
Global warning? Heat is energy. The warmer the oceans, the more energy they have and more moisture they carry. Weather patterns become more extreme, they last longer and reach further. High and low pressure areas get stuck in one configuration for weeks (like polar vortex 2021) instead of being blown apart as it happened in the past.
In Beryl’s case, it had a massssssive source of moisture coming up from the Gulf. The hot water in the Gulf provides significantly more fuel than a similar storm coming up the Atlantic. Yes, the Gulf Stream does exist and Atlantic storms might cross it for a burst of extra moisture/energy, but the Gulf of Mexico is the source of all of that. By coming up the west side of the Gulf, Beryl’s windfield was just constantly pushing all that Gulf moisture into the continental US for days and seeding the atmosphere it was going to continue into.
Even though Beryl lost its tropical characteristics a couple days after landfall, all that moisture was still available to fall as precipitation even after it transitioned into a “traditional” cold-core system we see weekly at those latitudes.
Hot air from Texas politicians?
observation bias; news is blasing hurricane news 24/7 now. remnants of hurricanes making their way to new england is nothing new. (irene 2011 being more severe than beryl)
however it is much more common with gulf storms than the ones that march up the coast. with normal weather patterns sweeping across the country west to east, and the moisture form the gulf and great lates there is a lot more natural pattern for the hurricane system to fall into before fully breaking up.
Something to consider is that after hitting land, Beryl gradually changed to something called a post-tropical cyclone. This type of storm gets its energy not from warm ocean water, as a hurricane does, but from the collision of air masses of different temperatures. This is actually fairly common for hurricane that find their way northwards, and many do bring rain to the northeastern US in this way. I can remember some intense thunderstorms from the remnants of Dennis back in 2005. The storm pulls a lot of moist air up from the Gulf of Mexico, pushing it into cooler air. This forces it upward and causes it to drop that moisture as rain.
A lot of post-tropical cyclones have major impacts, but what areas bear the brunt can be a toss-up. Looking at recent history, the post-tropical remnants of Hurricane Ida brought major flooding and tornadoes to the Mid Atlantic. Looking farther back, Hurricane Hazel brought significant flooding to parts of Canada as a post-tropical cyclone in 1954.
Hurricane Ida was similar in 2021. It provided huge rainfall to the Mid Atlantic as it combined with a low pressure frontal boundary coming from the west. In Beryl’s case, it was still gaining a lot of energy right up until the point it got past Houston. A strong low in the center kept pulling moisture from the Gulf as a “post cyclone”.
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