During the overnight hours on Thursday, Lee shattered the standard for what meteorologists call rapid intensification.
As of Saturday morning, Hurricane Lee is a Category 3 storm on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. Fluctuations in intensity are likely over the
next few days, however, Lee is expected to remain a powerful hurricane through early next week.
But Even as a Category 3 hurricane, Lee has left the experts astounded at its speed of intensification, literally rewriting all the rules meteorologists have used in defining the strength and overall power of hurricanes.
Lee is giving us a preview of things to come as our oceans continue to heat up, spawning fast-growing major hurricanes that could threaten communities farther north and farther inland, experts say, according to the Associated Press.
“Hurricanes are getting stronger at higher latitudes,” said Marshall Shepherd, director of the University of Georgia’s Atmospheric Sciences Program and a past president of the American Meteorological Society. “If that trend continues, that brings into play places like Washington, D.C., New York and Boston.”
As the oceans warm, they act as jet fuel for hurricanes. “That extra heat comes back to manifest itself at some point, and one of the ways it does is through stronger hurricanes,” Shepherd said.
Meteorologists have a standard for defining rapid intensification with hurricanes – defined as when a hurricane’s sustained winds increase by 35 mph (56 kph) in 24 hours.
“This one increased by 80 mph (129 kph),” Shepherd said. “I can’t emphasize this enough — we used to have this metric of 35 mph, and here’s a storm that did twice that amount and we’re seeing that happen more frequently,” said Shepherd, who describes what happened with Lee as “hyper-intensification.”
Lee was 385 miles (620 kilometers) east-northeast of the northern Leeward Islands as of 5 a.m. EDT Saturday, whipping up maximum sustained winds of 115 mph (185 KPH), according to the National Hurricane Center.
And because this hurricane isn’t exactly playing by the rules, it is expected to re-strengthen over the weekend and remain strong into the middle of next week.
Category 5 status is becoming more common
Only about 4.5 percent of named storms in the Atlantic Ocean have grown to a Category 5 in the past decade, said Brian McNoldy, a scientist and hurricane researcher at the University of Miami.
So Lee is in what used to be considered rare company. Reaching Category 5 strength has become more common over the last decade, CNN News is reporting. Lee is the 8th Category 5 since 2016, meaning 20 percent of these exceptionally powerful hurricanes on record in NOAA’s hurricane database have come in the last seven years.
The Atlantic is not the only ocean to have spawned a monster storm in 2023. All seven ocean basins where tropical cyclones can form have had a storm reach Category 5 strength so far this year, including Hurricane Jova, which reached Category 5 status in the eastern Pacific earlier this week.
Inside the eye of Hurricane Lee
A scary video has been posted by the U.S. Air Force Reserve’s 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron in Biloxi, Mississippi, known as the “Hurricane Hunters,” reports Space.com. It was published by the U.S. Department of Defense.
The rare look directly into the eye of a hurricane was made possible by the Hurricane Hunters. According to an Air Force fact sheet, the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron is the “only operational unit in the world flying weather reconnaissance on a routine basis.”
The squadron flies a specialized WC-130J Hercules aircraft. It’s equipped with specialized meteorological sensors including dropsondes, instruments that are dropped directly through storms in order to create a top-to-bottom profile of wind, temperature, and pressure. The aircraft can stay in the air for nearly 18 hours, allowing crews to collect weather data over extended periods.
