ORLANDO, Fla. _ Tropical Storm Dorian maintained 60 mph winds as of 11 a.m., but is still expected to grow into the season's first hurricane by Wednesday.
The five-day cone of uncertainty released by the National Hurricane Center puts the storm right over the Bahamas by 8 a.m. Saturday, but the edges of the cone are right off Florida's coast.
"I've been doing this 21 years, and I can tell you this track will change many, many times," said Fox 35 meteorologist Jayme King. "It'll scare us, we'll be relieved, then we'll be scared again. It's important just to be ready to go should this come a little bit closer to the region as proposed right now."
As of 11 a.m. Dorian's center was located about 135 miles east-southeast of Barbados and 245 miles east-southeast of St. Lucia. The storm was moving west-northwest at 14 mph with maximum sustained winds near 60 mph with higher gusts and tropical-storm-force winds extending 45 miles from Dorian's center.
St. Lucia is now under a hurricane watch, while a tropical storm warning is in effect for Barbados, St. Lucia, Martinique and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, while a tropical storm watch is in effect for Dominica, Grenada and Saba and St. Eustatius.
Forecasters said that Dorian is expected to move generally west-northwestward for the next several days and start impacting some Caribbean islands as early as today. The storm has developed slowly, but conditions favor it to reach hurricane strength by Wednesday, forecasters said.
"Anticipating when an eye will form is challenging, but Dorian could be a hurricane by the time it reaches the Windward Islands," hurricane center forecasters said.
How strong Dorian will get remains a bit of a question. The National Hurricane Center forecast as of 11 a.m. Monday predicted its winds would increase to 65 mph overnight, 70 mph by Tuesday evening, and hit hurricane-force winds of 75 mph by Wednesday morning and growing as strong as 80 mph by Thursday as it approaches both Puerto Rico and Hispaniola.
It's at that point, when the storm could interact with land, that forecasters are not sure how the storm will act.
"Any potential impacts from Dorian in the Bahamas and Florida later this week are highly uncertain, given the potential for the system to interact with the high terrain of Hispaniola," reads the 11 a.m. discussion on the NHC website.
While several models are used for the hurricane center's consensus cone of uncertainty, Fox 35's King said he's been paying close attention to the European model.
"It has very good resolution and has been in the vicinity of this track than NHC is proposing now for the last two or three days," King said. "I've noticed that it kind of brings it in closer range to Florida during that time."
The exact path will determine how much the storm interacts with the islands in the Caribbean, and whether it will affect the storm's intensity before potentially restrengthening in the warm waters near the Bahamas.
In Dorian's immediate path, though, forecasters said the storm is likely to bring 3-8 inches of rain from Martinique to St. Vincent, including Barbados, with isolated totals as high as 10 inches in portions of the northern Windward Islands.
Meanwhile, forecasters are still watching a low pressure system off the coast of Florida that is expected to move farther into the Atlantic away from the state and has a 80% chance of becoming a tropical depression in the next two days, 80% in the next five days.
"Interests along the coasts of South and North Carolina should continue to monitor the progress of this system," forecasters said. "An Air Force Reserve Hurricane Hunter aircraft is scheduled to investigate the system on Monday, if necessary."
