A weakened tropical storm Ernesto—formerly the first hurricane of the 2006 Atlantic season—made landfall in Cuba this morning with winds of 40 miles an hour (64 kilometers an hour).
The storm is expected to regain strength and become a hurricane again before striking South Florida as a Category One storm late this Tuesday—the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall in Louisiana and Mississippi.
Ernesto's eye is expected to cross the Florida peninsula and be offshore of Georgia by 8 a.m. Wednesday. The storm will still have hurricane intensity as Ernesto skirts the coasts of Georgia and the Carolinas, forecasters say.
But Irene Toner, emergency management director for Monroe County in south Florida, says Ernesto is proving to be a difficult storm to predict.
"The forecasters are very frustrated with this storm, because it's so all over the place," Toner said.
Meteorologist Mark McInerney of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida, says the storm's path will be determined by a "tug-of-war" between an upper level low-pressure system over Texas and a high-pressure system over the Atlantic Ocean.
The hurricane will get squeezed between these two systems, and the stronger system will determine which way it goes, he says.
"That's a tough call," he said. "It could ride up all along the coast and have the Outer Banks [islands of North Carolina] in its path. It may cross the Outer Banks."
First Hurricane
Ernesto became the first hurricane of the 2006 season on Sunday with winds of about 75 miles an hour (121 kilometers an hour)—at the low end of the Category One range (find out how scientists rank hurricane intensity).
Shortly afterward it crossed western Haiti, where the mountainous terrain disrupted the storm and reduced its peak wind speed. One related death has been reported in Haiti.
The weakened storm came ashore in Cuba around 11 a.m. local time about 35 miles (56 kilometers) west-northwest of Guantanamo Bay, McInerney says (map of Cuba).
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