A large, well-organized tropical wave that appears likely to become the season's fifth tropical storm, Erika, continued to move toward the Windward Islands on Monday.
Forecasters put the odds of the wave strengthening into a tropical depression in the next few days at better than 50 percent.
``Right now, it looks really impressive on satellite images,'' said Dennis Feltgen, a spokesman for the National Hurricane Center in Miami. ``We've had some flare ups of showers and thunderstorms today.''
At 2 p.m., the center was tracking the storm moving west-northwest at 15 mph about 500 miles east of the chain of Caribbean islands that make up the Windwards. The path immediately ahead was only ``marginally favorable'' for development for the next day or so -- in part because of a low pressure system off the Bahamas that is producing some wind shear.
Computer models vary widely on the system's projected path, Feltgen said, and it was too far away to predict whether it would pose a threat to Florida or the East Coast.
``We're going to be watching this thing closely,'' he said.
Email Story
Printer Friendly 
Quick Job Search
@Nyx.replyAnswerText@