A tropical system in the Gulf of Mexico may bring thunderstorms and gusty winds to the Bay area this weekend, National Weather Service meteorologist Tom Dougherty said Friday morning.

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Forecasters give the system a 70 percent chance of turning into a tropical depression in the next 48 hours. If the system were to become a tropical storm, it would be called Debby.

On Friday morning, the system was located near Cancun, Mexico and is shifting slowly northward. Dougherty said Southwest Florida residents should keep an eye on the system for the next three days.

"The most likely place for it to go is straight north to Louisiana or perhaps Texas," Dougherty said. "We have lesser chances of getting it here (in Southwest Florida) but it's still uncertain enough right now that everyone from Brownsville, Texas to Key West should keep an eye on it."

The system could bring rain and maybe gusty winds over the next three days, Dougherty said.

"It could be a wide variety of things," Dougherty said. "It could have a wide area of rain bands going around it. Some rain bands could have bad thunderstorms with gusty winds."

But Dougherty said it's too early to predict what the system will do since it's a big mass of low pressure with no clear path.

"Fortunately, it seems disorganized right now," he said. "It's far enough north that it probably won't turn into anything major."

10 News and the Fort Myers News-Press