From Wunderblog (on blogroll at right during the season):
After racing across the eastern Caribbean as an strong tropical wave, Invest 97L has finally been dubbed Tropical Storm Earl.
Late Tuesday morning, an Air Force hurricane-hunter mission found that
Earl had developed a closed circulation center with a minimum central
pressure of 1001 millibars. Flight-level winds reached 52 knots (57 mph) just after noon EDT Tuesday. In an special update issued at noon EDT Tuesday,
the National Hurricane Center placed the center of newly christened
Earl about 535 miles east of Belize City, Belize, with top sustained
surface winds of 45 mph. Carrying a large though somewhat disorganized
assortment of showers and thunderstorms (convection), Earl was moving
westward at 22 mph, a pace expected to slow over the next 24-48 hours as
Earl approaches Belize and the Yucatan Peninsula. Even before Earl’s
designation as a tropical storm, high winds in the Dominican Republic
brought power lines down and sparked a fire aboard a bus, killing 6 and
injuring 12 people, according to weather.com.
Three others were killed after a tour boat overturned, although that
incident had not yet been confirmed to be weather-related. The
Meteorological Service of Jamaica issued a tropical storm warning for 97L on Monday night, and on Tuesday the Cayman Islands National Weather Service was cautioning small craft to exercise caution in open waters. Surface winds at Kingston, Jamaica, peaked at 29 mph early Tuesday morning, with only light rain observed, although showers and squalls have affected other parts of Jamaica....MUCH MORE
