Spanish
Miami (USA).- Storm Humberto strengthens this Thursday in its advance through the Atlantic towards the north, while Hurricane Gabrielle, now category 1, weakens during its approach to the Azores Islands of Portugal, exposed the National Hurricane Center (NHC, in English) of the United States.
The agency warned that Humberto, which emerged this Wednesday, "is gaining strength", so it "expects it to become a hurricane in a day or more over the central Atlantic".
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The cyclone was in the latest report 750 kilometers (465 miles) east of the Northern Leeward Islands, in the Caribbean Sea, where it has maximum sustained winds of 85 kilometers per hour (50 miles per hour), with a displacement to the northwest at thirteen kilometers per hour (or eight miles per hour). For now, the NHC did not report any danger to land, but warned that "the forecast of the trajectory becomes more complicated in the coming days due to the proximity" of a system that could become a cyclone west of Humberto. On the other hand, Hurricane Gabrielle has decreased to category 1 after reaching level four on Monday, but authorities in the Azores, an autonomous region of Portugal, activated an emergency plan this Thursday. The NHC "forecasts that Gabrielle will approach the Azores late today as a hurricane", with maximum sustained winds of 120 kilometers per hour (75 miles per hour). NHC meteorologists had warned in early September that 60% of the cyclonic activity was still missing after a "relatively calm" start to the Atlantic season, which runs from June 1 to November 30 and had its "climatological peak" on September 10. So far, there have been eight cyclones this year in the Atlantic: hurricanes Erin and Gabrielle, and storms Andrea, Barry, Chantal, Dexter, Fernand and Humberto, of which Chantal has been the only one to make landfall this year in the United States, where it caused two deaths in July in North Carolina. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicted an "above-normal" hurricane season, estimating between 13 and 18 tropical storms, of which between five and nine could become hurricanes.
