Most of Florida avoided the brunt of Hurricane Dorian as it continues its track up the U.S. East Coast, but the Carolinas may see much more significant impacts in the coming days.
At 2 p.m. ET, the National Hurricane Center reported that Dorian was a Category 2 storm about 115 miles east of Jacksonville, Fla., and 180 miles south of Charleston, S.C. It was moving north-northwest at 9 mph with maximum sustained winds of 105 mph.
Tropical-storm-force winds are being felt as far as 175 miles from the eye, while hurricane-force winds extend as far as 70 miles from the center of circulation.
As the storm moves away from Florida, attention has turned to what lies ahead for Georgia and the Carolinas.
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According to the latest advisory, Dorian's core will track parallel to the Florida and Georgia coasts before moving near or over the coastline of South Carolina and North Carolina on Sept. 5 and 6.
A hurricane warning is in effect from north of the Savannah River in Georgia to the border of North Carolina and Virginia, including the Albemarle and Pamlico sounds. Storm surge warnings extend from north of Port Canaveral, Fla., to the North Carolina/Virginia border. A tropical storm warning is in effect from the Volusia and Brevard County line in Florida to the Savannah River in Georgia.
Meteorologist Dave Loewenthal who works in the Wilmington, N.C., office of the National Weather Service, said Dorian's eye is expected to stay offshore, but his region will still be subjected to hurricane-force winds, as well as an expected storm surge of between 4 and 7 feet.
"[The surge] will be strongest at high tide, which is tomorrow [Sept. 5] afternoon," he said in an interview. "We've had worse surges than that, but it will still cause problems in terms of coastal flooding."
Loewenthal added that because of a high-pressure system to the west, the storm should accelerate from its current speed to "around 15 mph" and shift to a more easterly track.
With Dorian remaining well off the coast, its impact on Florida was less than originally feared, according to meteorologist Kip Bricker, who works at the NWS office in Jacksonville, Fla.
"Right now, [the storm surge] hasn't been too significant, so our expectation is for it to be around 3 to 5 feet," said Bricker, who said in an interview that the effects have been confined to the immediate coast and the coastal counties. "We're all kind of happy that there appears to be less of a storm overall than what it could have been a few days ago."
Further south, Larry Kelly, a National Weather Service meteorologist at the Miami weather forecast office, said there was some coastal flooding in the Palm Beach area, but nothing significant in the way of storm surge.
"We're still collecting that data, but in South Florida, there wasn't much surge at all because we were on the southern end of the storm," he said.

