Hurricane Danny Strengthens to Category 3, Could Weaken

Hurricane Danny strengthened to a potentially destructive Category 3 storm on Friday, though it had likely reached its peak intensity and remained relatively small and far from land, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center.

Winds from Danny, the first hurricane of the 2015 Atlantic season, measured up to 115 miles per hour, government forecasters said.

Danny is expected to weaken back into a tropical storm as it reaches the outer Caribbean islands early next week, before heading towards Puerto Rico and the island of Hispaniola, shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, according to the Miami-based hurricane center's five-day outlook.

"Danny remains a very small tropical cyclone," the center said on Friday, after it had been upgraded to a Category 3 on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane wind intensity.

The center said hurricane-force winds extended only 15 miles from the center of the storm.

Danny was about to encounter a less conducive environment of upper winds, and was forecast to weaken over the next 48 hours, the center said in its latest advisory on Friday afternoon.

Danny is the fourth named storm of what forecasters have predicted will be a quieter-than-normal 2015 hurricane season, which runs from June 1 through Nov. 30.

The Saffir-Simpson scale measures potential property damage from a storm, with hurricanes reaching Category 3 and higher considered "major" hurricanes with a potential for significant loss of life and damage.

A Category 3 storm has winds of between 111 and 129 mph.

The government's seasonal forecast predicted six to 10 named storms this year, with as many as four reaching hurricane status of 74 mph, and at most one reaching the major category.

Still, forecasters warn that quieter-than-average years in the past have seen some of the most destructive storms in history, such as Hurricane Andrew in 1992, a Category 5 storm with sustained winds above 157 mph that devastated south Florida.

Among the factors in this year's predicted weaker hurricane season is the El Niño weather phenomenon, the warming of Pacific waters that affects wind circulation patterns and makes the formation of hurricanes in the Atlantic-Caribbean basin less likely.

The Climate Prediction Center, a National Weather Service agency, last week raised the likelihood to 85 percent that El Niño conditions would last into early spring in the Northern Hemisphere.