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🌀Hurricane Dorian will intensify greatly over the holiday weekend

Posted at 1:32 PM, Aug 29, 2019
and last updated 2019-08-29 16:53:56-04

RICHMOND, Va. -- Dorian became a hurricane around 2 p.m. Wednesday, and it has strengthened a bit since then.

The storm will travel over increasingly warmer ocean water before it makes landfall.

The National Hurricane Center's latest forecast has Dorian becoming a category four hurricane.  A wind speed of 130 mph is where category four starts, so if the winds don't get that high, the storm will be at least a very strong category three.

Dorian's forecast track brings the storm into east-central Florida on Monday.  However, the "cone of uncertainty" includes all of Florida and even parts of Georgia.   Some of the latest computer models are a little south of the National Hurricane Center's official forecast track.

Once the storm makes landfall, the computer models still have a very wide range of possible tracks.  There will be different factors at play to the north and northeast of the storm that will affect the movement of the storm, and it depends on how strong those are on Monday.  This means the storm could move westward into the Gulf of Mexico, swing to the east-northeast and go towards the Georgia and South Carolina coasts, or track to the north and northeast and head towards Virginia.  We will have a better idea of that this weekend.

There will be many revisions to the track forecast over the next few days.  If Dorian does end up affecting Virginia weather, it would be the middle to end of the next week.

Additional details can be found in the CBS 6 Hurricane Tracker.

Stay With CBS 6, The Weather Authority.

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