A tropical depression finally strengthened to Tropical Storm Hermine on Wednesday afternoon and is forecast to move toward the west coast of Florida, prompting the first hurricane watch in four years for that part of the state.
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As of 5 p.m. Wednesday, Hermine’s winds had reached 45 miles per hour and the storm was drifting north-northeast at 7 miles per hour.
Tropical storm conditions are expected to first reach the coast within the warning area by Thursday afternoon, and hurricane conditions are possible over portions of the hurricane watch area beginning Thursday afternoon.
On its current path, the system could make landfall on Florida’s north-central Gulf Coast on Thursday, bringing storms into Georgia and the eastern Carolinas on its way to the Atlantic Ocean.
A tropical storm watch is in effect for the southern half of Georgia’s 100-mile coast and a stretch of north Florida’s Atlantic region. Isolated areas could get up to 15 inches.
“The storm is up to 60 miles an hour and it’s started its north-northeastward move we feel we should start seeing some better consistency and fine tune where this thing is going to go”, Pfaff said during a Thursday morning conference call on the storm.
It’s expected to make landfall early Friday morning as a Category 1 hurricane in the northwest panhandle of Florida.
There are no longer any watches or warnings associated with Tropical Depression Eight, which also still has maximum sustained winds of 35 miles per hour. The tropical depression could become a tropical storm later Wednesday though no coastal warnings and watches are in effect for it.
Byron Miller, manager of The Ocracoke Harbor Inn, said one person canceled because of the forecast, and business is a little slower than usual. The National Hurricane Center said the depression is becoming more organized. I suspect they issued due to a few models increasing to hurricane strength and a blow up of convection more to the North of the suspected center.
Three separate tropical systems are menacing western Florida, the Outer Banks and Hawaii this week.
High pressure over the Great Basin promotes partly cloudy to mostly sunny skies into the desert southwest.
The level of impacts we see across our area are highly dependent on the exact track the storm takes. It’s still possible it could become a tropical storm later today, and the hurricane center said it looked a bit more organized Wednesday morning. It swept across the Everglades and struck heavily populated south Florida, causing five deaths in the state and an estimated 23 billion dollars in damage.
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A tropical-storm warning was also put in place from Indian Pass west to the Walton County-Bay County line.
