After forming in the Caribbean as a tropical depression, the storm that would become Hurricane Kyle brought heavy rains to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Then, drawn northward by an upper low off the Carolina coast, it became a tropical storm, passing just west of Bermuda. An approaching cold front continued to accelerate the storm and, moving north across the warm Gulf Stream, Kyle became a hurricane.
While most hurricanes fizzle out as they enter cooler waters of the North Atlantic, Kyle has been moving at a fast clip and its circulation has managed to hold together; this afternoon, the hurricane is about to make landfall across southern Nova Scotia and the south coast of New Brunswick. Heavy rains will lash Maine, west of its track, but the damaging winds and storm surge will be restricted to Canada.
Though nor'easters, produced by potent cold fronts, bring destructive winds and waves to this region on a regular (seasonal) basis, tropical hurricanes rarely reach this latitude; the last to strike coastal Maine was in 1991. Three days short of October, it's certainly odd to use the words tropical and Canada in the same sentence!
