Hurricane Lee now ‘extremely dangerous’ Category 5 storm – live

Lee’s rapid strengthening into a Category 5 hurricane on Thursday has made it one of the “fastest intensifying Atlantic hurricanes ever observed”, experts said, as the National Hurricane Center warned the storm could intensify further by Friday morning.

“Hurricane #Lee has explosively intensified into a Category 5 storm and is expected to peak as a monster 180mph Cat 5,” Colin McCarthy, who tracks tropical storms, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Experts have warned that if Lee intensifies further and reaches 180mph speed, it would only be the ninth storm in the Atlantic to reach that level.

“If that happens, it would put Lee in an elite club, with 8 other storms reaching 180mph. 5 Atlantic hurricanes on record have had stronger winds,” meteorologist Jeff Berardelli wrote.

Hurricane Lee rapidly intensified to a Category 5 storm on Thursday night as it churned towards Caribbean islands with “life-threatening” conditions expected to develop in the coming days.

The National Hurricane Center said in its 11pm advisory that the storm could go through “further strengthening” overnight, which could make it one of the rarest hurricanes in the Atlantic.

Lee was located about 705 miles (1,135km) east of the northern Leeward Islands and packing maximum sustained winds of 160mph (260kph).

After three years of the cooler La Nina pattern, which often lowers global temperatures slightly, the WMO announced on Tuesday that El Nino conditions were present and are expected to gradually strengthen into the winter.

The last significant El Nino event occurred in 2016, which has gone down as the warmest year the world has seen since records began.

Its recurrence in 2023, when global heating driven by man-made carbon emissions has only accelerated, threatens a “double whammy”, according to the WMO, which has warned there is a 90 per cent probability of it lasting to the year’s end.

That means the likelihood of extreme weather events that could prove life-threatening has also increased, prompting the organisation’s officials to caution world governments that they must be prepared.

The National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration warned in August that this year’s season would produce an above-normal number of storms. Between 14 to 21 named storms are forecast. Of those, six to 11 could become hurricanes, with two to five of them possibly becoming major hurricanes, the agency said.

Meanwhile, AccuWeather updated its forecast, predicting there would be three to five hurricanes Category 3 or stronger this season, compared with one to three in its previous analysis.

Hurricane Lee was captured by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellite on Thursday as it spins towards the Leeward Islands.

As the global average temperature increases, largely due to the carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels, the ocean is taking a major hit.

The ocean has absorbed 90 per cent of warming in recent decades and all that extra heat is driving historically high water temperatures.

Warmer waters supercharge tropical cyclones with more heavy rainfall and storm surge as they come ashore.While the frequency of hurricanes of tropical storms is not increasing, the chance that they become stronger, more destructive systems has increased by about 8 per cent per decade in the past 40 years, according to climate scientists.

The proportion of Category 4 and 5 tropical cyclones is projected to increase around the world in the coming decades due to human-caused warming, according to the latest report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from 1 June to 30 November, is forecast to be above average this year.

Record hot ocean temperatures and a tardy El Nino are doubling the chances of a nasty Atlantic hurricane season this summer and fall, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said last month.

With the Atlantic hurricane season already well above normal so far, NOAA increased how many storms to expect and how busy the season can get.

The earlier forecast leaned more toward a near normal season with a 40%, but the chance for normal has now shrunk to 25 per cent.

The latest spaghetti models for Hurricane Lee show it taking a northward turn — and in some cases, a turn that takes it close to the US and Canadian East Coasts — as it travels through the Atlantic Ocean.

Hurricane Lee became a Category 4 storm on Thursday afternoon, and is forecast to become a Category 5 before it begins to slow.