Hurricane Beryl: How Sea Surface Temperatures Impact The Strength Of Storms

2 months ago

Meteorologist Dr. Marshall Shepherd joined Brittany Lewis on "Forbes Newsroom" to discuss Hurricane Beryl.

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Transcript

00:00And do you think we're going to see rapidly intensifying storms more this season?

00:07You know, the trends have certainly been in that favor over the last couple of years going

00:13back even to 2020.

00:14I mean, from 2020 onward, we've seen a lot of rapidly intensifying storms, and that's

00:21because, Brittany, that pool of water out there is quite warm.

00:25I mean, the warm water, what we call ocean heat content, the hurricanes drop on that.

00:32And if they have this ample warm water and they start to develop, and there's a really

00:36favorable upper-level environment with not a lot of wind shear tearing that vertically

00:40erect storm apart, that storm can just, poof, blow.

00:44And it gets stronger, the pressure in the center of the storm goes down, so when we

00:48see decreasing pressure in a hurricane, that means it's getting stronger, the winds respond

00:52by getting faster.

00:53So it's all very much connected, so that's why we very much keep an eye on the sea surface

00:58temperatures and the upper-level conditions as well.

01:01You mentioned when you were writing for Forbes about Hurricane Beryl that there is another

01:05storm that you're keeping your eye out, you're going to write about it later, but is there

01:08anything you can tell us about that now?

01:11You know, I've looked at the latest model projections, they're starting to back off

01:15of that one a little bit.

01:16And part of the reason actually may be because of Beryl.

01:19As Hurricane Beryl churns along, it churns up colder water behind it, in the ocean,

01:26and that could be part of the reasons why the models are starting to sort of back off

01:30on that storm.

01:31Now, it still may have, briefly, the latest I saw from the models this morning on July

01:351st, is it's still resolving some type of system, but whether it actually gets to anything

01:40beyond a tropical storm or even to a tropical storm now remains to be seen, because it may

01:45be feeling some of the effect.

01:47Remember, I said that warm ocean water is important, but Beryl is so strong, it's churning

01:51up deep, colder water, so that next system would have to come behind it.

01:56It may be feeling the effects of some of that, what we call upwelling, that churning up of

02:01colder water.

02:02And so, I think it remains to be seen.

02:03But the key message here, Brittany, and you're spot on with bringing this up, we're not going

02:08to be able to let our guard down this hurricane season.

02:11It's going to be an extremely busy hurricane season.

02:13I'll give you a little nugget for the listeners and viewers.

02:16You may be familiar with the fact that in recent years, which is astounding in itself,

02:21hurricane seasons have been so active that we've run out of names on the name list.

02:26When that happened in the past, we had to use the Greek alphabet, so once we ran out

02:30of the names, we'd start with Hurricane Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and so on.

02:34This year, there's been a change.

02:36There actually is now a supplemental name list that would be used.

02:41Only reason I'm bringing that up is I believe that we could have an active enough season

02:45that we may run out of names this year.

Hurricane Beryl: How Sea Surface Temperatures Impact The Strength Of Storms

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