Bertha is currently heading slightly northwest and is expected to turn north afterward. This will take her into colder waters where she will continue to weaken and return to her daily depression. Bertha will probably then hitchhike down the gulf stream and ditch her rain in Britain – that’s what summer has been like here this year!

However, even as this hurricane weakens, Bertha has already made it into the record books. Simply by being the named storm that traveled farthest east prior to August 1. For the record, it was named a tropical storm at 24.7 ° W surpassing poor old tropical storm Anna which hit 36.0 ° W, back in 1969.

Now, a hurricane is basically an area of ​​intense low pressure that originates over the warm tropical oceans. These depressions often begin life as a messy mass of great storms as they head off the west coast of Africa, feed off the warm ocean, and explode in monstrous hurricanes that can cause so much destruction when they make landfall thousands of miles later.

The path of the hurricane is key to its size. A hurricane needs a warm ocean to survive. If you travel north, the waters cool and the hurricane weakens. If you travel through Florida, a hurricane may weaken temporarily, but it will pick up again once it enters the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, one of the reasons Katrina was such a devastating storm. Of course, just because a storm weakens does not necessarily mean that it will lose its destructive capacity. Often times, a former hurricane snaking down the northeast coast of the United States will interact with a system coming from the mainland and cause massive damage to the coastline and shipping.

Anyway, back to Big Bertha. It is interesting to note that the temperatures of the sea surface where Bertha was born are a couple of degrees Celsius warmer than average. So what impact will this have on the rest of the hurricane season? Well, the last time a hurricane developed this far west, so early in the season, was 2005. And 2005 will be remembered for the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans and the surrounding coastal regions, making Katrina a one of the most destructive storms to ever make landfall in the United States. 2005 also saw a total of 15 hurricanes, 7 major hurricanes, and 4 category five hurricanes. These included the huge stomrs Emily, Rita, and Wilma. The total losses from these 4 storms exceeded $ 120 billion.

So the history of past storms may mean that we are now entering an ominous season. If Bertha ventures out into the mid-Atlantic, minding her own business and drifting with the flow, little will she know that she could have been a prophetess of doom during one of the most severe hurricane seasons in many years! Only time will tell.