SAN JUAN (AP) – Hurricane Lee charged through warm Atlantic waters and threatened to unleash heavy swells across the northeast Caribbean. It became the season’s first Category 5 storm before beginning to weaken.
When it went down to a Category 3 hurricane by late on Friday, it was not expected to make landfall, but meteorologists warned it would generate dangerous waves of up to five metres (m) across the northern coast of Puerto Rico and other nearby islands.
Lee was on a path that would take it a couple hundred kilometres (km) northeast of the Caribbean, and tropical storm conditions were not forecast for the region. “Although the hurricane is incredibly powerful, its wind field is not particularly large,” the National Hurricane Centre said.
The hurricane was centred about 705km east of the northern Leeward Islands late on Friday.
It had maximum sustained winds of 185 kilometres per hour (kph) and was moving west northwest at 20kph.
“Fluctuations in intensity like what has occurred this morning are not uncommon in intense hurricanes,” the centre said.
At one point, forecasters said Lee might restrengthen and reach winds of up to 290kph.
Only seven Atlantic hurricanes have had winds of that magnitude since 1966, said Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach. Among those was Hurricane Dorian, which pummeled the northern Bahamas in 2019 as a Category 5 storm, hovering over small islands for about two days.
Hurricane Lee strengthened from a Category 1 storm to a Category 5 storm in less than 24 hours, said forecaster Lee Ingles with the National Weather Service in San Juan. She said warm waters and a lack of wind shear contributed to the rapid intensification.
“The hurricane had all the ingredients to become a powerful storm in such a short amount of time,” she said.
Ingles warned that climate change will lead to more rapidly intensifying storms in upcoming years.
The hurricane centre said dangerous surf and deadly rip currents would likely hit the northern Leeward Islands later.
