Tropical Storm Chris rapidly ran out of steam Thursday morning as it pushed across the eastern Caribbean, prompting forecasters to say it was unlikely to become a hurricane.
At 8 a.m. EDT, Chris had top maximum sustained winds of 40 mph, just 1 mph above the minimum to be a named storm and down 20 mph from Wednesday night, according to the National Hurricane Centre in Miami. The centre of the storm was about 285 miles east-southeast of Grand Turk Island. The third named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season was moving west-northwest near 12 mph and was expected to move away from Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands later today.
This image was taken at 23:25 UTC on August 1, 2006, by the TRMM satellite as Chris was about to pass to the northeast of Barbuda. The image shows the horizontal distribution of rain intensity within Chris. Rain rates in the centre swath are from the TRMM Precipitation Radar, and rain rates in the outer swath are from the TRMM Microwave Imager. The rain rates are overlaid on infrared data from the TRMM Visible Infrared Scanner.
Credit NASA
The rain field was fairly compact and shows that Chris was a rather small storm. The centre was still poorly defined in this image with no evidence of an eye. Banding features (curvature) were also weak to non-existent, signs that the storm was still in the process of organising. There are, however, areas of moderate rain (bright green to orange areas) near the centre of Chris. These were associated with areas of moderate convection, which can help to spin-up the circulation when they occur near the storm’s core. At the time of this image, Chris was a moderate tropical storm with maximum sustained winds reported at 93 kilometres per hour by the National Hurricane Centre. Twelve hours later, Chris’s sustained winds had increased slightly to 100 km/hr as the storm continued track off to the west north-west just north of the Virgin Islands.
Tourists evacuated two small islands off the coast of Puerto Rico on Wednesday as Tropical Storm Chris gained strength in the eastern Caribbean and was expected to become the first hurricane of the Atlantic season.
The storm had top sustained winds of 65 mph as it skirted the northern Leeward Islands and moved west-northwest toward the U.S. Virgin Islands, the British Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. A hurricane watch was issued for the southeastern Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands. The watch issued at 11 a.m. EDT meant hurricane conditions of winds of at least 74 mph were possible within 36 hours. The storm was expected to pass at least 100 miles north of Puerto Rico, but up to 8 inches of rain was likely to cause flash floods and mudslides.
"We'll see the effects of heavy rain and wind gusts from the periphery of the system" - Rafael Mojica, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
Some 600 tourists evacuated Culebra and Vieques, islands off Puerto Rico's east coast. People in the islands of Antigua and St. Maarten awoke to a light rain. There were no reports of major flooding or other damage from the storm. Forecasters said the storm could hit anywhere from south of Cuba to Florida by late this weekend. The first named storm of the 2006 season, Tropical Storm Alberto, swept over Florida in mid-June, then ploughed northward along the U.S. coast past the Outer Banks. It was blamed for one death. Last year's hurricane season was the worst in more than 150 years of records. A record number of tropical storms and hurricanes formed, including the devastating Hurricane Katrina.
