On Saturday, the first hurricane of the Atlantic season developed into a Category 1.

The hurricane, named Beryl, has sustained winds of approximately 75 mph as of Saturday afternoon, having grown from 60 mph on Friday when it was still a tropical storm. Beryl is expected to continue to strengthen as it travels west across the eastern Caribbean, potentially experiencing “rapid intensification.”

According to Eddie Walker, AccuWeather’s Senior Storm Warning Meteorologist, “Steering breezes will guide the system to cross the Windward Islands of the eastern Caribbean from Sunday night to Monday, then waters near Jamaica during the middle of next week and perhaps to the shores of Central America or southeastern Mexico at the end of next week.”

Another AccuWeather meteorologist noted that storms in this longitude and latitude are uncommon for this time of year, with only “seven named storms” forming “over the last 173 years” prior to Independence Day.

Beryl intensified into a hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean, and the US National Hurricane Center said it may undergo rapid strengthening https://t.co/N9wbGDa00M pic.twitter.com/4T6DYfX4fm

— Reuters (@Reuters) June 30, 2024

Fox Weather reported that the first hurricane in the Atlantic basin doesn’t typically arrive until around August 11 on average, so Beryl is ahead of the game, which is likely due in part to the unseasonably high ocean temperatures.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicted that 2024 will see an above average hurricane season, with 8 to 13 hurricanes, and 4 to 7 being classified as “major.”

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NOAA blames the likely above average season on the El Niño/La Niña pattern, as well as ocean temperatures, which “in May were closer to what we would expect in late August, when we are approaching the traditional peak of the hurricane season.”

When the 2023 hurricane season came to a close last year, it ranked as the 4th most active in the last 73 years of tracking, though only Hurricane Idalia made U.S. landfall as a category 3 in northwest Florida.