Tropical Storm Richard in the northwestern Caribbean Sea will strengthen into a hurricane this weekend before hitting Belize and Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula on Monday, the U.S. National Hurricane Center predicted Friday.
After crossing the Yucatan, the remnants of Richard could emerge in Mexico’s oil-rich Bay of Campeche before possibly tracking toward the U.S. oil and natural gas production facilities in the northern Gulf of Mexico, the NHC and some computer weather models forecast.
Richard was packing winds of 40 miles per hour. It was located about 235 miles south-southeast of Grand Cayman. Elsewhere, the NHC pointed to two low pressure systems in the Atlantic: one a hundred miles south of the Cape Verde Islands with a 30 percent chance of strengthening into a depression, and another about 1,000 miles east of the eastern Caribbean Islands with a 10 percent chance of developing.
The weather models forecast the Cape Verde system would pose no threat to land, other than maybe the Cape Verde Islands, as it moves northwest in the Atlantic closer to Africa than North America over the next several days.
It was too soon for the weather models to project where the other Atlantic system, with a 10 percent chance of developing, would make landfall, if at all.
Source : Reuters
