Dangerous Lee churning off East Coast

AccuWeather

AccuWeather forecasters say that Hurricane Lee will make landfall this weekend as a powerful storm, impacting part of the U.S. and Atlantic Canada.

Transcript

00:00 Hurricane Lee making that turn toward the north today.

00:03 That north movement continues tomorrow.

00:06 But then we're looking at a movement toward coastal Maine as we move into Saturday.

00:10 All right, here's what you need to know for Hurricane Lee.

00:13 It will make landfall Saturday night anywhere from coastal Maine, midcoast down east Maine

00:19 toward the southwest tip of Nova Scotia.

00:22 There's already dangerous rip currents underway from Florida into the Carolinas, and we're

00:26 going to see building surf and probably some beach erosion and coastal flooding across

00:31 the mid-Atlantic coast as we go over the next couple of days.

00:35 Heavy rain, damaging wind gusts and power outages will occur across eastern New England,

00:39 and we're really worried about a destructive coastal flooding and beach erosion event across

00:44 eastern Massachusetts on the backside of Lee.

00:48 All right, I want to show you Lee right now on the water vapor loop.

00:51 You can see all the moisture in white.

00:52 Here's the drier in the yellow.

00:54 What you can also see is this dip in the jet stream coming in across the Midwestern part

00:59 of the United States.

01:00 Now, for the last two weeks, we've been talking about this trough.

01:03 Will this trough have the ability to pick up Lee and keep it away from the United States

01:09 this weekend?

01:10 And the answer is no, it will not.

01:11 Now it will influence it.

01:13 In fact, it will.

01:14 This is what's going to be turning Lee toward the north over the next 24 to 36 hours.

01:19 But the problem is this trough is not going to be strong enough.

01:22 Lee's not going to be far enough north for this trough to just pick up Lee and continue

01:26 to move it to the north as we get toward Friday and Saturday.

01:30 Instead what's going to happen is, beginning late tomorrow night, but especially on Friday,

01:34 this trough is going to lift.

01:36 Lee's going to be pretty far south, and it misses the connection with the midweek trough.

01:41 So what happens is this gets left behind.

01:45 Then you have our next trough coming in in the Midwest, and you have to remember these

01:49 troughs, along with high pressure off to the east, act as a magnet in a sense pulling Lee

01:57 back toward the west, and that's what's going to be happening later this weekend.

02:01 So when you look at the AccuWeather eyepath here, that turn to the north continues, and

02:06 then as the trough gets established, you get a bending of Lee back toward the west Saturday,

02:13 and that's going to take it awfully close to the main coast as we get into Saturday

02:18 night.

02:19 Now, here's the eyepath, a little zoom in here, and you notice we are calling this,

02:23 or calling landfall, we think it's going to happen right near the main New Brunswick coast.

02:29 That'll be late Saturday night as a tropical storm.

02:33 Now Lee's going to be losing wind intensity because it's going to be going over much cooler

02:37 waters, and when that happens, not only does it lose wind intensity, but you start losing

02:42 tropical characteristics.

02:43 So what this storm may look like, instead of a circular appearance that it looks like

02:47 now, it's going to look like that comma head that you see in nor'easters.

02:53 That's what this may resemble.

02:54 The other thing that occurs during this process, when you go from a tropical system to a non-tropical

03:01 system, the wind and the rain, which generally is tight around the eye, kind of expands outward.

03:08 So as we take a look at the wind map, you can see, and the rain map, you can see a heck

03:13 of a lot more impacts in a larger area.

03:16 Here is the rainfall map, I want to take this full for just a second here.

03:20 There is the rain map, and you notice we're starting to put more and more rain on the

03:24 western side of the storm here across eastern New England, where we're looking at about

03:28 two to four inches of rain, and this may have to be adjusted a little farther west, as often

03:33 times on the back side of these systems, as they lose tropical characteristics, you get

03:38 heavier rain on the western side.

03:40 So we may be adjusting that a little off to the west.

03:42 Now look at the wind here, we're still talking 40 to 60 mile per hour wind gusts in and around

03:47 Boston, Cape Cod over 60 miles per hour, and right in this zone, where you're close to

03:52 landfall, from down east Maine, the mid-coast, towards southwest Nova Scotia, we could have

03:58 a gust near 80 miles per hour.

04:01 Certainly, with the wind, as I mentioned, this can bring down some trees, some power

04:06 lines, and produce quite a bit of power outages.

04:08 By the way, again, as Lee pulls northward, you're going to get that northeasterly wind,

04:13 that's going to pile the water up along the east coast of Massachusetts, and I'm afraid

04:18 that we're going to be looking at destructive flooding in there, and a lot of coastal inundation

04:24 Saturday afternoon and Saturday night.

04:26 Thank you.

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