Hurricane Ike to strengthen before hitting Texas

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Hurricane Ike will mushroom into a powerful Category 3 storm as it slowly swirls west across the Gulf of Mexico before slamming into the oil-rich Texas Coast early Saturday, the U.S. National Hurricane Centre forecast on Thursday.

Ike is still a Category 2 storm with winds near 100 miles per hour (160 kph) but is expected to strengthen into a Category 3 storm with winds of 111 to 130 mph within 36 hours before striking the Texas Coast.

The centre of the storm was located about 440 miles (710 km) east-southeast of Corpus Christi, Texas, and about 470 miles east-southeast of Galveston, Texas, the NHC said in its 2 p.m. EDT (7 p.m. British time) report.

The weather models show Ike could hit anywhere from the central Texas coast to the Louisiana border.

Energy traders watch for storms that could enter the Gulf of Mexico and threaten U.S. oil and natural gas infrastructure along the coast.

Commodities traders likewise watch storms that could hit agriculture crops such as citrus and cotton in Florida and other states along the Gulf Coast to Texas.

Elsewhere in the Atlantic, the NHC estimated an area of disturbed weather, including some of the remnants of Tropical Storm Josephine about 350 miles east of the southeastern Bahamas, had a less than 20 percent chance of developing over the next 48 hours.

Half of the weather models forecast the system would move northwest without threatening any land over the next five days. The other half showed the system turning west and passing over the Bahamas.

(Reporting by Scott DiSavino, editing by Matthew Lewis)