Kevin Myatt is The Roanoke Times' weather columnist.

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Hurricane Frances | Tropical Storm Gaston

Tropical Storm Gaston has spun up quickly to 50 mph winds off the South Carolina winds, and conditions are favorable enough that a hurricane watch has been posted for the South Carolina coast. Gaston may indeed become a hurricane by landfall on Sunday.

This comes two weeks after Hurricane Charley made its second landfall near Myrtle Beach, and 4 weeks after Hurricane Alex spun up in the same general area and then scraped along Ocracoke Island, N.C. The Carolinas are having a busy tropical year.

Please be advised of Gaston's presence if you plan travel on Sunday to the South Carolina coast. In fact, you'll probably want to postpone it. It's not likely to get Charley-style rough down there, but 75 mph winds with higher gusts are nothing to sneeze at.

Meanwhile, Hurricane Frances has blossomed to a Category 4 hurricane with 135 mph winds several hundred miles east of Puerto Rico. The U.S. may well have to deal with Frances before all is said and done.

The tropics are dancing with activity.

Aug. 27: I thought we'd have a week to keep up with the next threat to the U.S. coast, and it could be a big one in Hurricane Frances, which is now projected to go Category 4 (130-154 mph winds) and possibly Category 5 (155-plus winds) in the next couple of days.

But long before Frances becomes a factor, we have a tropical depression off the South Carolina coast that could make landfall by Monday as Tropical Storm Gaston. If TD7 stalls off the coast for longer, we could even be looking at a hurricane, similar in its development to Alex.

The big high pressure system aloft building from the East Coast deep into the Atlantic -- the one that's brought us a touch of calm, warm, slightly summerish weather -- is helping these tropical systems fire. High pressure aloft helps evacuate winds away from the developing tropical systems, helping the spin faster, and also suppressed development of other systems that could steal moisture and energy. This high pressure system may also keep the storms from turning out to sea, shoving them into the U.S. coast.

We've already had a major double-landfalling hurricane in Charley, a landfalling tropical storm in Bonnie, and an Outer Banks scraper in Alex. We could have at least two more named storms hitting the U.S. in the next 7-10 days. We're not even to halftime of the tropical season yet. It's shaping up to be the busiest since the mid 1990s.