A complicated forecast scenario continues to unfold Friday near the Bahamas as Hurricane Humberto and a system that is expected to become Imelda develop, strengthen and move east of the Florida coast.
The potential impacts to the U.S. East Coast remain uncertain and depend in large part on how Humberto and eventually Imelda interact, if at all.
It is Imelda that would pose the most significant threat, forecasters say, despite Humberto being the more powerful storm — rapidly intensifying to near Category 4 strength over the next few days, the National Hurricane Center said.
Eventual Imelda is forecast to develop much closer to the U.S. coast, according to Hurricane Center maps, become a tropical depression later today or early Saturday, and eventually Tropical Storm Imelda.
The biggest threat from Imelda is to the coasts of Georgia and South and North Carolina. Forecasts show the storm approaching land late in the weekend or early next week. Whether it actually makes landfall, and how strong the storm is at the time, is uncertain as of Friday morning.
If the storm develops and moves more slowly, it could be pulled away from the coast by the larger Hurricane Humberto. If it moves faster, it could continue on a track north and make landfall, bringing heavy rain and strong winds to Georgia or the Carolinas.
“There’s the best-case possibility that after moving north offshore of Florida for a while, likely-Imelda gets scooped by the big upper low and follows likely-Hurricane Humberto out to sea,” Fox Weather hurricane expert Bryan Norcross wrote in his blog, Hurricane Intel. “In this scenario, Bermuda will have to watch both storms.”
As of early Friday, Humberto’s maximum sustained wind speeds had increased to 75 mph, making it a Category 1 storm. It was located about 465 miles northeast of the Caribbean islands with hurricane-force winds extending 10 miles out from the center and tropical-storm-force winds extending outward 105 miles.
Humberto is tracking slowly to the northwest and is forecast to speed up, intensify and turn north over the weekend.
The system that may eventually become Imelda is centered near the Dominican Republic on Friday. It is forecast to bring heavy rain and gusty winds to the Dominican Republic, Haiti and eastern Cuba as it continues to organize.
Wind shear and high terrain that has been hampering the system should subside by Friday as the system encounters the warm water near the Bahamas, said WPLG-Ch. 10 Hurricane Specialist Michael Lowry. Those two factors should allow the system to become more organized.
Spaghetti models — the combined forecast paths generated by the various storm modeling computers — vary. But they show the storm tracking close to the Dominican Republic and Haiti, through or east of the Bahamas and off the east coast of Florida and Georgia.
Humberto “will likely create rough surf and rip currents that could impact beaches across the Bahamas and the East Coast starting this weekend,” AccuWeather’s Alex DaSilva said. “People in Bermuda and along the East Coast should monitor forecast updates closely. The storm may develop quickly.”
Any impact to the U.S would be late in the weekend or early next week, Norcross said. But he added that the long-range forecast is murky.
“A fundamental rule of forecasting is that forecasts for disorganized, just-organizing, or slow-moving systems are subject to larger-than-normal errors and subject to change. This system looks to check two of those boxes,” he said.