Hurricane Maria continues to move northwest right toward the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.

Unfortunately, this will be bad news as it will bring large amounts of damage and long lasting power outages to areas that have a harder time recovering from such disasters.

Maria is going to be one of the strongest hurricanes in modern times to hit Puerto Rico. Along with the wind damage and power outages will come major flooding and mudslides due to the large amount of heavy rainfall.

Maria will likely weaken a bit after passing Puerto Rico due to the interaction with the higher mountains. But within a day, Maria will likely re-intensify over the warm waters between there and the Turks and Caicos.

Maria will continue moving northwest until this weekend, when it finally makes its north turn. Some have questioned that north turn after the emotional stress from Irma, but the atmospheric setup is totally different this week, and we’re very confident Maria will stay well east of Florida. The high pressure is not as far west anymore and will move out of the way, allowing Maria to move north.

Beyond that point, the most likely scenario is that Maria stays just east of the United States mainland and travels northeast, weakening as it moves into the cooler north Atlantic waters. However, there is a possibility it could come close the northeast or mid-Atlantic coast next week if it doesn’t turn sharply enough. So that’s something we’ll be watching.

Jose, on the other hand, is weakening off the coast of the northeast and will not be a major threat. Even if it slowly loops and tries to go back toward land, it will be much weaker at that point.

Make sure to watch our tropical updates each hour at :49.

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