Tropical Storm Andrea kicks off the start of the hurricane season

With the forecast calling for an 'active to extremely active' hurricane season this year, things have kicked off with Tropical Storm Andrea, which is scheduled to make landfall on Florida's Gulf Coast on Thursday evening.

TS Andrea is currently packing gale-force winds, with gusts up to 80 km/h and it's expected to gain strength before it makes landfall. After dumping about 70 to 150 mm of rain over northern Florida and southeastern Georgia by Friday afternoon, it's expected to skirt the east coast over the next few days, arriving in Atlantic Canada sometime on Saturday evening.

[ Related: Forecasters warn of ‘extremely active’ hurricane season this year ]

Winds from the storm are likely to gain strength on Friday and into Saturday, but it's expected to lose some of that by the time it reaches New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. It should still pack a punch, with winds around 65 km/h and bringing between 50 and 100 mm of rainfall with it, but the forecast will be updated throughout the remainder of the week, so those projections may change before the storm arrives.

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If the name sounds familiar to you, there was also an Andrea back in 2007, although that was a 'subtropical storm' that spun up to the east of Florida on May 9th-11th, which was before the official hurricane season started on June 1st. The National Hurricane Center recycles hurricane names on a six-year schedule, but any storm that causes significant enough damage has its name 'retired', and a new name with the same starting letter is chosen to replace it. There have been 77 retired names since 1954, with 22 in the past 10 years, including Sandy in 2012 and Katrina in 2005.

(Images courtesy: NASA/NOAA/NHC)

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