00:00 turn our attention now to Hurricane Lee. Accuweather's team of hurricane experts
00:04 predict Lee will become the first Category 5 hurricane of the season.
00:08 Chief meteorologist John Porter has more.
00:11 Accuweather is the first source to forecast this storm to become a
00:16 Category 5 hurricane, and we were the first source to issue any forecast for
00:20 this storm 24 hours before anybody else. We do that here to help give you the
00:25 best information so you can keep make the best decisions, keep you and your
00:28 family safe. Notice the rapid intensification on the Saffir-Simpson
00:32 scale as the storm gains wind intensity. It's going to become a large storm and
00:36 a powerhouse.
00:37 Accuweather is also the only source to track now Hurricane Lee seven days out.
00:45 Most outlets do it out five days, but we go out seven days to give you more time
00:49 to prepare. Okay, here's a look at Lee's path right now from the experts at
00:53 Accuweather. And right now you can see that the projected center of this storm
00:58 another thing we do differently in Accuweather is we will kind of hedge our
01:02 bets here as far as where the center of the storm will be as far as the
01:06 forecast cone and we're leaning toward it being a little bit farther to the
01:09 east into the cone. We don't put it right down the middle. It kind of goes
01:13 whichever way we're leaning and leading east is a good thing for the U. S. East
01:16 Coast because we don't want anything to do with Hurricane Lee when it moves
01:20 into the that part of the Atlantic by the middle to the end of next week.
01:23 Another thing we want to mention is that we've updated our hurricane forecast
01:27 for this season here at Accuweather. The change we made is increasing the
01:31 number of major hurricanes that we're expecting here, folks for this year.
01:36 We're gonna circle it in a cold front, but yes, definitely 3 to 5 major
01:40 hurricanes. It was 1 to 3 upping the anti conditions are just so ripe out
01:46 there in the Atlantic for development. I give you Hurricane Lee. This thing has
01:50 intensified rapidly just over the last 25 24 hours or so. If you look at the
01:55 pressure, it is now at 9 91 millibars. Eso that is something that we don't
02:02 we don't want to keep going down, but it will be now it's going into warm
02:05 water. There's very little wind shear. The wind shear has has moved far to the
02:09 north, so it's just a perfect environment for strengthening. The
02:13 upper level high will bring Lee to the northeast of Puerto Rico as we head
02:18 over the next several days. And this weekend there'll be some impacts into
02:21 the Virgin Islands, but eventually it will make its way up past Bermuda. And
02:26 right now it looks like interaction with the East Coast is possible. But if
02:30 it does happen, it would be most likely from the outer banks of North Carolina
02:34 northward and not for at least a week to 10 days.
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