Here's the latest on Dean as of this morning....
The latest long-range forecast for Dean, meanwhile, has the storm reaching destructive Category 4 status -- with winds of at least 131 mph -- by Monday in the western Caribbean between Cuba and Mexico's Yucatan peninsula.
Hurricane watches were issued Wednesday night for islands in the Lesser Antilles including St. Lucia, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Saba and St. Eustatius, which means that hurricane conditions, with winds of at least 74 mph, are expected within 36 hours. A tropical storm watch was also issued for St. Maarten.
Neither the latest five-day forecast nor the latest computer models show Dean as a threat to Florida or the U.S. East Coast, although it could reach the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico early next week, with its path still uncertain.
At 2 a.m. Thursday, the center of Dean was about 485 miles east of Barbados. The storm's maximum sustained winds were nearly 75 mph.
Dean is forecast to cross the Lesser Antilles Friday, then strengthen as it moves westward across the Caribbean to the south of Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Cuba. On that track, both Jamaica and the Cayman Islands would be directly in line for a major hurricane.
However, because the movement of a hurricane can be unpredictable, the actual path a storm takes often varies widely from the long-range forecast, and almost the entire Caribbean -- from the Bahamas to Venezuela -- still has the possibility of being affected by Dean, according to the
National Hurricane Center.