Danielle becomes first hurricane of the 2022 Atlantic season

By Jay Croft, CNN

The first hurricane of the Atlantic season, which debuted earlier this week, got its full billing Friday.

Danielle is now the season’s first hurricane, with sustained winds of 75 mph and even higher gusts, the National Hurricane Center said in its 11 a.m. ET update.

Still, it’s not promising much drama, since Danielle is far offshore and won’t come ashore for at least five days.

The storm is expected to “meander over the open Atlantic during the next couple of days,” before heading to the northeast early next week, the hurricane center said.

The hurricane center says Danielle will become only a Category 2 hurricane and will remain almost stationary throughout the weekend.

The hurricane center announced on Thursday that Danielle had become a named storm in the North Atlantic, the first since July 3.

That means that last month was the first August in 25 years to go without a single named storm in the Atlantic.

The last time a season’s first hurricane came this late was on September 11, 2013, with Hurricane Humberto.

The average date for the season’s first hurricane is August 11.

This was only the third August since 1950 that the Atlantic saw no named storm. And it’s the first time since 1941 that there wasn’t a named storm in the Atlantic from July 3 to August 30, said Phil Klotzbach, a research scientist at Colorado State University.

“This remarkably quiet Atlantic tropical cyclone period is likely to end soon,” Klotzbach said Wednesday.

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CNN’s Allison Chinchar and Judson Jones contributed to this report.