Tropical Storm Nestor heading for Carolinas; Philly region could be on ‘fringe’

It’s getting late, but the hurricane season in the Atlantic Basin evidently still has some life left.

Friday evening, hours after the National Hurricane Center gave it a name, Tropical Storm Nestor was about 140 miles south of the mouth of the Mississippi with peak winds of 60 mph and heading northeast at better than 20 mph.

Surge and tropical-storm warnings were in effect for portions of the Florida Panhandle and west coast.

The hurricane center forecast called for Nestor to continue northeast and soak the Carolinas with up to 4 or more inches of rain.

For now it does not present a serious threat to the Philadelphia region, although it has an outside shot at being a Sunday spoiler.

“Our area could be on the northwestern fringe of the precipitation shield of Nestor,” the National Weather Service Office in Mount Holly said in its afternoon discussion.

With Nestor, the Atlantic Basin, which includes the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, has experienced 14 named storms. The annual average is 11.

But so far Philadelphia hasn’t had much in the way of rain from a tropical storm or remnant.

As for Nestor, the weather service sees a 40 percent chance that will change on Sunday.