Two storms back-to-back
Hurricanes Marco and Laura are set to dominate energy trading this week. Marco has been a tough-to-predict storm that's now cutting sharply westward as a tropical storm. Laura has a much higher potential to grow into a major hurricane as it moves to the south of Cuba.
At the moment, Laura is being hit by strong sheer that's likely to continue to weaken the storm.
"Some large changes have been required on this forecast. Considering the shear is only forecast to increase, there is no significant chance that Marco re-intensifies to a hurricane, and the hurricane warnings have been replaced with tropical storm warnings," the NHC said in its latest forecast.
What Marco is doing is absorbing some of that sheer ahead of Laura, which could hit anywhere from south Texas to Florida in the next three days, likely hitting the US gulf coast late Wednesday or early Thursday.
The NHC models disagree about how intense the hurricane will be but two of them see a major hurricane (Category 3 or higher).
The GFS and ECMWF models, along with the statistical and corrected-consensus models, only strengthen the cyclone to a peak intensity around 75 kt. In contrast, the HRWF and HMON models bring Laura to major hurricane strength by 60 hours
