Hurricane Sandy is currently gaining momentum to make its landfall in southern New Jersey early Monday evening, said the National Hurricane Center.

The forecaster said the center of Hurricane Sandy continued moving quickly toward the northwest and predicted it would make landfall in southern New Jersey by early this evening.

"The center of Sandy is expected to reach the coast of extreme southern New Jersey or central Delaware within the next three to five hours," said the National Hurricane Center in a statement issued at 3 p.m. EDT.

As of 3 p.m. EDT, the National Hurricane Center's latest data showed the hurricane, whose center was about 180 kilometers southeast of Atlantic City, New Jersey, or 273 km away from the city of New York, was moving northwest at 44 kilometers per hour.

Sandy, which has killed 69 people in the Caribbean, will meet with cold fronts coming out of the northwest and a high pressure system from Greenland, reemerging with enough energy to be as powerful as, or even worse than the 1991 storm, which also came around Halloween that year and killed dozens of people.

Meteorologists have been using the term "Frankenstorm" to describe the havoc brought by Sandy, which could affect hundreds of millions of people living along the East Coast. Endi