Don’t call it Florence, but a new tropical storm could be brewing in Atlantic

A storm brewing in the Atlantic Ocean has a 20 percent chance of becoming another tropical storm in the next five days, according to the National Weather Service.

But it is not fair to call it the remnants of Hurricane Florence, an official with the National Hurricane Center said Thursday night.

That’s despite what the National Weather Service’s office in Charleston tweeted earlier.

If the storm does form into a tropical storm, it would get a different name.

“The system we currently have in the Tropical Weather Outlook near Bermuda is not the “remnant low” of Florence as the NWS office in Charleston stated in their tweet,” said Michael J. Brennan in an email to McClatchy on Thursday night. Brennan is a branch chief with the Hurricane Specialist Unit.

“The surface low associated with Florence became elongated and lost definition over the mid-Atlantic states, and evolved into a much larger weather system associated with a front that moved off the east coast earlier this week. This new low developed from part of that larger system, but it is not closely enough associated with Florence to be called its direct remnants.”

Florence, which made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane on Sept. 14 in Wrightsville Beach, N.C., brought heavy winds and rain to North Carolina and South Carolina before making its way up the East Coast, spawning deadly tornadoes and flooding in Virginia and rain up the coast before it, as Brennan says, “became elongated and lost definition.”

Florence has been linked to 42 deaths in the Carolinas and Virginia.

The thought of another storm even threatening the East Coast is enough to worry those still drying out from Florence.

“Although there are some signs of organization, dry air and strong upper-level winds are expected to limit development of this system over the next couple of days,” the NWS said in its tropical weather outlook. “However, conditions could become a bit more conducive for this low to gradually acquire tropical characteristics early next week as the low moves south and then drifts westward to the southwest of Bermuda.”

Hurricane Florence approached Bermuda from its southeast.

Brennan wrote that the weather system “does not pose any immediate threat to the U.S., but we’ll continue to monitor it.”