body,td,th { font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; }
And as Corozal waits - they are a part of an entire collective of anxiety along the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula.
That's because -somewhat unexpectedly - Hurricane Beryl - which has been weakening for the past 40 hours - looked this afternoon as if it was ready to start re-gathering strength.
The Chief Met Officer explained in his 3:30pm briefing:
Ronald Gordon, Chief Met Officef
"Currently the system has weakened, as you can see. It's now a Category two. However, I asked to share a screen because as you can see from the image that I am displaying, I hope you can see it, but there's an eye wall forming to the north and there's the appearance of an eye forming once again. That is typically an indication of re-strengthening."
"So it appears that Beryl is fighting against wind shear due to and the very warm waters, as we had discussed previously, is trying to win over with some re-intensification. There's a possibility that at the next advisory, it may be back up to a category three. I don't know yet."
"Okay. So this is our local radar, of course from the National Meteorological Service."
"And what you're seeing there are bands of showers coming into the country in association with Beryl. We already had a band passing this morning. We have a few more coming in over the country at the moment. We have some forming offshore and we expect these bands of showers to continue to come into the country. Showers and thunderstorms as Beryl approach approaches the Yucatan Peninsula, we still remain under a tropical storm watch, not a tropical storm warning, a tropical storm watch from Belize City northward to the border with Mexico, including, of course, the islands of Ambergris Caye and Caye Caulker."
"We expect that tropical storm sustained winds will not be felt in neither areas. However, we may have gusts in these squalls, in these bands to tropical storm strength. And I remind the public that tropical storm winds are from 39 miles per hour to about 73 miles per hour. Given that the center of the system will make landfall way to the north of us and the radi, or the radius to which tropical storm force winds extend do not come all the way down to Belize. I do not expect sustained tropical storm force winds, as I said previously, but we may have winds gusting to tropical storm within these bands and these will be mostly affecting the north of the country."
The 6:00 pm forecast shows the maximum sustained winds holding steady at 110 miles per hour which makes it still a category two storm.
