On Tuesday, it strengthened further, with maximum sustained winds of 65 miles an hour.
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While Fiona spins towards its inevitable destruction, Tropical Storm Gaston has formed and is expected to become a hurricane.
Fiona is a post-tropical cyclone, Tropical Storm Gaston is moving across the Atlantic Ocean and a tropical wave is headed toward the Caribbean.
Jeff Masters, at the forecasting service Weather Underground, gave it a 70 percent chance of becoming a tropical storm by the end of the week. Its track after that is hard to predict, but there is potential for the storm to take aim at the Bahamas and the southeastern United States.
While the environment hasn’t been conducive for development, it will now enter a more favorable atmosphere.
Elsewhere in the Atlantic, Fiona is barely maintaining its status as a tropical depression. The third system we are watching is a cluster of thunderstorms called a “tropical wave” located a few hundred miles east of the Lesser Antilles.
The upper level ridge that is bringing the dry conditions will weaken enough to allow the chance for the scattered storms to return Thursday and Friday.
Along the islands of the northeast Caribbean Sea and the central and southeast Bahamas… they will experience heavy rainfall… gusty winds and possible flash flooding and mudslides.
The system, which would be named Hermine if it further develops, is nearly 1,400 miles away from South Florida. The image showed the system was developing a well-defined circulation and still consolidating.
The Air Force reconnaissance plane dispatched Tuesday to check out a worrisome weather system over the Atlantic came back with good news – there’s no sign of a hurricane growing. It is not expected to impact the United States.
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More than 80 percent of the computer runs from the models now considered most reliable show the storm hitting the Southeast between Florida and SC, said meteorologist Jeff Masters, of Weather Underground, and very few show the storm missing the USA entirely.
