What is a Tropical Cyclone? Our First Alert Weather team explains.

BALTIMORE- The National Hurricane Center announced "Potential Tropical Cyclone Sixteen" on Thursday.

With the term 'potential' in use we see a slight margin of uncertainty surrounding the formation of this system. Between now and landfall expected, the development of a tropical storm could fall short, thus keeping the storm itself from being named. The storm just to our east is trucking towards North Carolina but will push further inland towards Maryland by the weekend. If this system does start to organize more we will drop the PTC #16 and then turn to the name Ophelia to reference the storm. 

Until we see more organization Potential Tropical Cyclone will be used to describe the storm.

The National Weather Service issued a Tropical Storm Warning for Worcester, Somerset, Wicomico, Dorchester, Calvert and St. Mary's counties from Friday morning until further notice. 

In addition to this the NWS has also put out wind advisories for portions of the state Saturday from 10 am through 6 pm as we could see gusts upwards of 50 mph.