The skies clouded and the wind began to blow Saturday afternoon as the northern edge of what forecasters think will become a tropical depression in the next day or two moved over the Virgin Islands.
“It’s going to be breezy,” Jose Alamo, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in San Juan, said Saturday.
However, Alamo doesn’t expect this tropical disturbance to turn into a depression while it’s overhead.
Across the territory, Alamo expects winds to blow at 15 to 20 mph with higher gusts. He said the Virgin Islands will also see more rain later Saturday night, but the rain should start clearing up by Sunday afternoon. Expect the winds to stick around until Monday, Alamo said.
At Weather Station Zephyr, located at Ajax Peak in the Coral Bay area of St. John, the top wind speed for the afternoon occurred at 3:45 p.m. The gust hit 30 mph.
Tropical Storm Igor continues to churn out in the Atlantic, but Alamo said the “guidance” indicates that it will move to the northwest and away from the northern islands.
Currently, forecasters expect Igor to become a hurricane later Saturday or Sunday and a Category 4 hurricane when it nears the area.
“But it’s still a question mark how close it will get,” he said.
As of 5 p.m., Igor is centered at 17.4 degrees north latitude and 41.2 degrees west longitude. This puts it 1,360 miles east of the Leeward Islands.
The wind speed stands at 70 mph, with gusts to 85 mph. Tropical storm force winds extend outward 115 miles. It is moving west at 18 mph. The barometric pressure stands at 995 millibars or 29.38 inches.
A tropical wave that just popped off the African coast looks pretty “impressive,” Alamo said. It could become a tropical depression in two or three days, but Alamo said where it will go isn’t clear.
“It’s been hard for the National Hurricane Center to figure its path,” he said.
