The fast moving Hurricane Beryl has hit a different area just about every day this week. This morning (Friday at 6am) the storm is making landfall on the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico near Tulum, with the south end of Cozumel being in the main damage swath and impacts across much of Quintana Roo…
Here is a link to NHC’s Key Messages regarding Hurricane Beryl (en Español: Mensajes Claves), and below is the rest of the forecast swath using the TAOS/TC impact model. NHC is now showing the final landfall for Beryl on the coast at Brownsville Texas, with Padre Island in the main damage swath. Watches and warnings for Texas and the Tamaulipas coasts will go up later today as Beryl races across Yucatan. Beryl is finally slowing down, so the next landfall after it exits Yucatan later today will be early Monday morning.
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Beryl is looking pretty ragged this morning on IR satellite (the sun isn’t up yet over the storm), and the latest aircraft data shows the eyewall has disintegrated (due to shear and land interactions most likely).
Still, there might be pockets of high winds and NHC is holding the intensity at 110 mph (a maximal Saffir Simpson Category Two), although I suspect that is pretty generous and the overall impact will be similar to a high end Cat 1 or low end Cat 2. But the landfall is in a very expensive resort area, so it’s easy to run up a significant economic hit, and of course the population density is such that unfortunately there will be further human impacts was well even assuming a good evacuation and sheltering plan. Although there is flash flooding in places, Beryl is moving so fast that the main impacts are wind and coastal wave/surge damage. Beryl remains a very compact storm – so as bad as the impacts have been (and will be), they are not nearly as bad as they could have been.
Beryl will have decayed below hurricane strength by the time it enters the Gulf of Mexico, but conditions are somewhat favorable and the water warm, so NHC is expecting the storm to regain Category One hurricane status before the Brownsville landfall on Monday.