Hurricane Ernesto formed in the eastern Caribbean Sea on August 24, 2006. Within a day, it had become organized enough to be classified as a tropical storm and get named as the fifth storm of the 2006 Atlantic Season, Tropical Storm Ernesto. Ernesto built in power gradually as it moves westward and slightly north through the Caribbean Sea, just reaching hurricane strength as it neared Hispaniola (The island on which the nations of Haiti and Dominican Republic are located.) on August 27. This made it the first storm of the 2006 Atlantic season to reach hurricane strength. However, the interactions of the storm with land robbed Ernesto of enough power to sink it back to storm status again, where it is anticipated it will remain until at least after it crosses Cuba, forecast to have happened on August 28. If predictions made on August 28 hold true, the storm will travel most of the length of Cuba, then cross the Straits of Florida, possibly regaining enough power to become a hurricane again before coming ashore again in southern Florida.

This photo-like image was acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Terra satellite on August 27 2006, at 11:50 a.m. local time (15:50 UTC). Hurricane Ernesto at the time of this image was a well-developed storm system, but its interactions with Hispaniola had started to distort the hurricane enough to rob it of a well-defined eye. According to the University of Hawaii’s Tropical Storm information center, Ernesto had sustained peak winds of around 110 kilometers per hour (65 miles per hour) at the time Aqua MODIS acquired these data.