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Another powerful hurricane is already brewing in the Atlantic

The National Hurricane Center predicts that Irma will stay in the Atlantic, at least through Wednesday.

It’s shaping up to be a busy hurricane season.

Just as Tropical Storm Harvey — formerly known as Hurricane Harvey — was being downgraded again on Thursday to a tropical depression, a new storm started worrying meteorologists: Irma.

Irma, now barreling toward the Caribbean, formed as a tropical storm on Wednesday morning. By Thursday evening, however, the storm had strengthened at an alarming rate: Winds had built up to 115 mph — what meteorologists call “rapid intensification — making it a Category 3 hurricane. And as Irma tracks across the Atlantic, it’s expected to build to a Category 4, at least.

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“Irma has become an impressive hurricane,” the National Hurricane Center wrote in a notice issued late Thursday. By Friday morning, the agency noted that Irma was on the move, “which should allow the hurricane to intensify.”

Meteorologists are calling Irma a classic example of a “Cape Verde” hurricane, a category of particularly dangerous storms that form near the Cape Verde islands in the eastern Atlantic. For example, Hurricane Ivan, the Category 5 storm that hit the Gulf Coast in Alabama in 2004, was a Cape Verde storm — so was Hugo, another Category 5 that hit just north of Charleston in South Carolina in 1989.

In any case, the U.S. has a few days to prepare. The National Hurricane Center predicts that Irma will stay in the Atlantic, at least through Wednesday. By Monday, we’ll know which of the models predicting Irma’s path is correct.

For now, the storm’s still far off U.S. coasts, 1,700 miles east of the Leeward Islands.