Something which I should have made mention of a lot earlier. The upper level troffiness largely responsible for the increasing shear on Bertha from the northwest, has also been participating in enhancing the now very healthy outflow channel zoom-zooming off to her NE. So, there is some serious give and take going on over Bertha right now. On the one hand, you have the cyclone becoming (a little) asymmetric, as the shear starts to gnaw at her more. On the other, you still have this dynamite outflow. In fact, recently TWC's Dr. Lyons made mention that in his opinion, the outflow channel has been the largest single factor in the cyclone's intensification to a major hurricane, today.

It appears probable that Bertha has peaked out today at around 105 knots, give or take. This just about pushed the outer limits of Kerry Emanuel's Maximum Potential Intensity index (MPI), being that SSTs did not improve all that much over the course of just the past 18-24 hours.