Aug. 29, 2008 — The National Hurricane Center in Miami said early Friday that Tropical Storm Hanna had formed northeast of the Leeward Islands in the Atlantic, but local forecasters don't anticipate the storm will have a destructive impact on the Virgin Islands.
Even so, the hurricane season is heating up going into the peak month of September, with a west to east lineup of Tropical Storm Gustav off the coast of Jamaica, Hanna, a tropical wave halfway between Africa and the Lesser Antilles and another tropical wave expected to strengthen as it moves farther off the coast of Africa.
As of 5 a.m. AST, Hanna was about 300 miles northeast of Puerto Rico and the V.I. and was pushing west-northwest at about 12 mph. Meteorologist Scott Stripling of the National Weather Service Office in San Juan said the storm should continue that motion for the next 24 hours, carrying it away from the V.I. But heavy rains may be in the offing.
"What we're looking at is a large area of deep tropical moisture flowing into the east side of Hanna that's going to drag slowly across the Lesser Antilles and the Virgin Islands tonight and Saturday and maybe into Sunday morning," Stripling said. "There's a good chance that lines of showers and thunderstorms could move very slowly across the V.I. and could dump periods of heavy rain."
Stripling said flash flood watches and warnings are not out of the question for the Virgin Islands.
The hurricane center's forecast path for Hanna, the eighth tropical storm of the season, has it uncharacteristically jogging southwest in a couple of days toward the Bahamas; Gustav too has proved somewhat unpredictable as it has wandered the central Caribbean, and Stripling acknowledged as much.
"The computer models have not been doing a very good job with this storm or with Gustav," he said.
Nonetheless, hurricane forecaster Eric Blake said in a statement that Gustav should bulk up substantially as it moves west-northwest away from Jamaica. "Vertical wind shear is forecast to be very light during the next couple of days, and combined with the deep, warm Caribbean waters could produce a strong hurricane very quickly," Blake said.
Gustav's path should take it toward landfall sometime Tuesday along the U.S. Gulf Coast.
The Atlantic hurricane season runs through Nov. 30.
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