A strengthening Hurricane Tammy, with top winds currently at 100 mph, is now forecast to become a “powerful extratropical cyclone,” according to the latest from the National Hurricane Center.
As of 5 a.m. Wednesday, Tammy’s maximum sustained winds spiked to 100 mph, up from 75 mph within 12 hours’ time. Tammy was located 540 miles south-southeast of Bermuda, traveling northeast at 10 mph.
Tammy’s top winds could reach as high as 105, forecasters said. Tammy is expected to continue north Wednesday, then turn northwest on Thursday and Friday. By Thursday, it is expected to have weakened to a post-tropical cyclone. Tammy could affect Bermuda.
Tammy made landfall on Barbuda on Saturday night with 85 mph winds and lashed the Leeward Islands on Sunday.
The hurricane swiped the far eastern Caribbean two weeks after Tropical Storm Phillippe dumped 6 to 8 inches of rain over Antigua and Barbuda and knocked out electricity there, according to The Associated Press.
So far this season in the Atlantic, there have been 19 named storms, seven of which were hurricanes. Of those, three were major hurricanes, meaning Category 3 or above.
Those were Hurricane Lee, a rare Category 5; Hurricane Franklin, a Category 4; and Hurricane Idalia, which made landfall on Florida’s Big Bend region at Category 3 strength on Aug. 30.
The remaining storm names for 2023 are Vince and Whitney. If all those names end up being used this season, the National Hurricane Center would turn to the supplemental list of names from the World Meteorological Association. In previous years, the Greek alphabet was used for additional storm names — which had only happened twice before — during the record-shattering hurricane seasons in 2005 and 2020.
Hurricane season officially runs through Nov. 30.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.