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
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.
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