Strong Hurricane Beryl Crosses West Indies

After seeing the early forecasts for an extremely active, dangerous 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, I decided to be more intentional on the blog with noting them.  Already in June we've had three named storms...Alberto hit Texas earlier with tropical-storm-force winds while causing some flooding in southeastern Texas.  Then Beryl, a trans-Atlantic storm, only a few days ago rapidly intensified into a strong hurricane...at this writing it's passing through the West Indian Grenadines...with Grenada on the south and St. Lucia and St. Vincent to the north...with a tightly wound center harboring maximum sustained winds of 150: a Category 4 storm unseen at this time of year...and its rapid intensification is unprecedented since records have been kept, both for the time of year and for its eastern Atlantic location.  Beryl's projected path currently has it crossing the Caribbean Sea and eventually hitting Mexico in the eastern Yucatan area, our cruise destination back in early March.  Meanwhile, while all the attention was on Beryl, Tropical Storm Chris was named just off the eastern Mexican coast around where Alberto had been, and then promptly moved inland and dissipated.  There's another disturbance, called Invest 96L, in Beryl's former path between it and Africa...it'll probably strengthen as well.  Since the waters down south in the Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico are all very warm, wind shear and land itself may be the only factors that can weaken these potentially monster storms.  More later...