Keep an Eye on Beryl and Starbase

As always around this time of year, it kind of becomes a hobby of mine to watch the tropics and whatever is going on. Needless to say, this week has been focused on what became Hurricane Beryl and watching the predictions. The storm track has always been fairly narrow, meaning the models tended to be in agreement. A minor exception is that a couple of days ago, the forecast approach to Jamaica drifted away from the island but then started drifting back. As of now, it looks like the south side of Jamaica is going to get hammered. As of the 5PM update, Beryl was no longer Cat 5 with winds at 165, but at 8PM, she's still a strong Cat 4 with winds of 150 mph. Very little infrastructure, even well built, can take that. This prediction chart can be found at the National Hurricane Center.

I want to draw your attention to the westernmost end of the predicted track, showing the storm going ashore in Mexico as a tropical storm at 2PM Sunday. The expansion of the track as the 5 days goes by is normal, and I've seen everything from about this width to giant circles at 5 days when the models don't agree.  The way the end of the path goes asymmetric, with a kink around where the date/time is 2PM Saturday, is an indication the models are leaning toward the storm curving more northerly toward the end. Here's the plot of the 1800Z UTC (2PM EDT) model runs from Tropical Tidbits, a good, geeky place to get info.

You can see a few traces toward the top of the path, and those are like the the bubble showing a bias to that direction.

SpaceX's Starbase Boca Chica is essentially at the Texas/Mexico border not quite half the diameter of that circle above the point of impact in the NHC forecast above. The blue lines at the bottom of the model runs are the UK Meterological Office, or UKMET models, which over the years have garnered my respect for being right quite often. That argues it probably will take the centerline that the Hurricane Center plot above it shows. Probably.

How do we know what to expect? We don't know. We have to wait and find out. Chances are that by the time the storm hits the Yucatan peninsula around the northern border of Belize early Friday morning, we'll have a better idea where this is going. If every run of the models keeps pushing the storm further north and east, keep up with those models.

The potential impacts to Starbase obviously go up the closer landfall gets to the base. At some point, and it might be Thursday (?), they're going to have to start preparing for the storm. It's hard to imagine the storm can generate as much force as the launch mount gets from a Super Heavy, but it's just as hard to imagine nothing gets thrown around in the wind.