Watch as powerful Hurricane Matthew heads toward Haiti and Jamaica
The extremely powerful Hurricane Matthew is making its way through the central Caribbean.
Satellite images on Monday morning showed the dangerous Category 4 storm heading toward Haiti and Jamaica with maximum sustained winds of 130 miles per hour.
The hurricane is expected to approach the two island nations on Monday night, causing potentially catastrophic flooding and landslides, U.S. forecasters warned.
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Hurricane Matthew on late Friday strengthened to a rare Category 5 storm, making it the first Atlantic hurricane to reach that strength in nine years.
The massive storm triggered heavy flooding along Colombia's La Guajira peninsula over the weekend and brought storm surges that soaked streets across Jamaica's coastline.
Frankie Lucena, a Puerto Rican photographer, said red sprites, the large-scale lightning that forms above thunderstorm clouds, appeared Friday night as Hurricane Matthew passed Colombia and Aruba.
Hurricane Matthew weakened slightly to a Category 4 over the weekend but is still on track to wreak havoc throughout the Caribbean.
The storm could bring pockets of up to 40 inches of rain in parts of southern Haiti and the Dominican Republic's southwestern coast, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) said in its 8 a.m. EDT public advisory.
Eastern Cuba and western Haiti could see possible rainfall of up to 20 inches on Tuesday, and Jamaica may experience up to 15 inches of rain in some places.
"This rainfall will likely produce life-threatening flash floods and mudslides," the NHC warned.
Along with rainfall, a combination of dangerous storm surge and large, destructive waves could raise water levels by up to 10 feet above normal tide levels along the southern coast of Haiti, according to NHC.
Southern Cuba could see water levels rise by up to 11 feet, while the the central and southeastern Bahamas could experience water levels of up to 15 feet.
Haitian officials have urged people to stock up on food and water and have built about 1,300 emergency shelters across the county, enough to accommodate about 340,000 of the island's 10.3 million residents, BBC reported.
The Jamaican government on Saturday encouraged people to evacuate, and emergency service workers rushed to secure buildings for shelters.
Hurricane Matthew is expected to move generally northward over the west-central Atlantic during the next couple of days, and could track east of Florida later this week, official forecasts show.
Still, the NHC warned it is too soon to rule out possible hurricane impacts in Florida.
"It is also too soon to know whether, or how, Matthew might affect the remainder of the United States east coast," the NHC said in its Monday morning discussion.
Maria Gallucci was a Science Reporter at Mashable. She was previously the energy and environment reporter at International Business Times; features editor of Makeshift magazine; clean economy reporter for InsideClimate News; and a correspondent in Mexico City until 2011. Maria holds degrees in journalism and Spanish from Ohio University's Honors Tutorial College.
