Tropical Storm Beryl moves toward southeast U.S. coast

ATLANTA (Reuters) - Tropical Storm Beryl closed in on the southeastern U.S. coast on Sunday as Memorial Day weekend beachgoers braced for heavy rains and dangerous surf stretching from northeast Florida to South Carolina.

The second named storm of the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season is expected to make landfall late Sunday or early Monday.

The powerful pack of thunderstorms has prompted tropical storm warnings along the U.S. coastline in northern Florida, Georgia and parts of South Carolina.

At 2 p.m. EDT (1800 GMT), Beryl was packing sustained winds of 65 miles per hour and located about 110 miles east of Jacksonville, Florida, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

It was moving west toward the U.S. coast at 10 mph with tropical storm force winds extending about 90 miles from the center.

The storm's approach led some vacationers on the Georgia coast to pack up and leave early, said Alden Alias, the front desk manager at The King and Prince Hotel on St. Simons Island, a popular coastal resort town.

'The waves are pretty big,' she said. 'The winds are starting to pick up.'

Computer forecast models show Beryl moving on an eventual path back out over the Atlantic after coming ashore, posing no threat to U.S. oil and gas installations in the Gulf of Mexico.

Forecasters say it is expected to weaken to a depression on Monday.

The storm is forecast to dump as much as 3 to 6 inches of rain in some areas and threaten rip currents and possible coastal flooding, the center said.

Beryl formed off the South Carolina coast late on Friday as a subtropical storm, a reference to the storm's structure. Subtropical storms usually have a broader wind field than tropical storms and shower and thunderstorm activity farther removed from the storm's center.

It was reclassified a tropical storm on Sunday.

Beryl followed the season's first storm, Tropical Storm Alberto, which was the earliest-forming Atlantic storm since 2003.

The Atlantic hurricane season officially runs from June 1 to November 30.

(Writing by Kevin Gray; Editing by Jackie Frank)



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