Skip to footer

Hurricane Humberto just misses setting record

Hurricane Humberto, as the first such storm of the season, would have been the tardiest to form if it had been three hours later. The hurricane was located west-northwest of the Cape Verde Islands on Wednesday.

|
AP Photo/NOAA
This satellite image made available by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows tropical storm Humberto off the coast of West Africa on Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2013. Humberto has since been declared a hurricane.

The National Hurricane Center (NHC) declared Humberto a hurricane at 5 a.m. on Wednesday – meaning the storm, the first hurricane of the season, missed the title of being the tardiest such storm by a mere three hours.

At the time of the announcement, Humberto was located 310 miles west-northwest of the Cape Verde Islands and was producing winds of approximately 75 miles per hour, making it a Category 1 storm. 

But Humberto is unlikely to make it to land: The storm is expected to strengthen Wednesday before weakening on Thursday, according to an NHC report. 

The Category 1 designation indicates four-to-five-foot water surges, but any damage from such storms is usually minimal.

Since 1967, when meteorologists began using satellites to track storms, the first hurricane of the season that formed the latest materialized at 8 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2002, Dennis Feltgen, an NHC spokesman, told Bloomberg. The earliest hurricane on record was named April 20, 2003, according to Weather.com. The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 to Nov. 30.

This hurricane season has been one of the calmest on record. There have been eight named storms thus far, but none gathered enough intensity to be rated as hurricanes until Humberto. A storm is given a name if it becomes a tropical storm, meaning that the storm's winds have reached 63 miles per hour. A tropical storm is then declared a hurricane only if winds reach 74 miles an hour.

Another storm, Gabrielle, recently passed west-southwest of Bermuda and is expected to weaken in the next 72 hours. It drenched the Bermuda islands on Monday, the NHC reports. 

“A slow northwestward motion is expected to resume later today and continue through the night,” Michael Brennan, a senior hurricane specialist at the NHC in Miami, said in an advisory, as reported by Bloomberg. “A gradual turn toward the north is expected Thursday and Thursday night.”

The turn will put the storm on track to sweep by Nova Scotia and Newfoundland later this week, according to Environment Canada.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Hurricane Humberto just misses setting record
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/USA-Update/2013/0911/Hurricane-Humberto-just-misses-setting-record
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe