Danny’s a Big Boy Now

Brian Peters | August 21, 2015 @ 1:12 pm

Not only is Danny the first hurricane of the 2015 season, he is also the first MAJOR hurricane of the season.

At 2:00 pm AST, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) in Miami issued a tropical cyclone update announcing that the NOAA aircraft investigating the storm found maximum estimated winds to be 115 mph. This makes Danny a Category 3 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale.

I know that is certainly not good news for anyone in the Southeast US or along the Gulf coast since the forecast track of Danny currently appears to be on a fairly straight line for the Florida Straits. But there is good news in that Danny is moving into an area of unfavorable upper level wind, so a weakening trend is expected to begin later today.

View of Danny:

View of Danny from the GOES Caribbean view:

Official track of Danny from NHC around noon:

-Brian-

Category: Tropical

About the Author (Author Profile)

Brian Peters is one of the television meteorologists at ABC3340 in Birmingham and a retired NWS Warning Coordination Meteorologist. He handles the weekend Weather Xtreme Videos and forecast discussion and is the Webmaster for the popular WeatherBrains podcast.