Lee intensifies to a Category 1 Hurricane, while Jova intensifies to Category 5 (Update: Lee also reaches Category 5)
1-minute Mesoscale Domain Sector GOES-16 (GOES-East) “Red” Visible (0.64 µm) and “Clean” Infrared Window (10.3 µm) images (above) showed Lee as it intensified to become a Category 1 Hurricane in the Central Atlantic Ocean on 06 September 2023. The coldest cloud-top infrared brightness temperatures were around -90C (brighter white pixels embedded within darker black areas).
Lee had been moving across warm water — and was traversing an environment having low deep-layer wind shear (below) — factors which were favorable for intensification. Water temperature and wind shear imagery was sourced from the CIMSS Tropical Cyclones site.
Meanwhile, in the East Pacific Hurricane Jova rapidly intensified to a Category 4 storm by 2100 UTC on 06 September, exhibiting a pinhole eye as seen in GOES-18 (GOES-West) Visible and Infrared imagery (below).
Similar to Lee, Jova had been moving across warm water — and was traversing an environment having low deep-layer wind shear (below) — factors which were favorable for intensification.
Jova was later upgraded to Category 5 intensity at 0900 UTC (Infrared images: animated GIF | MP4).
===== 07 September Update =====
At 0300 UTC on 08 September, Hurricane Lee was upgraded to a Category 5 storm (the first Category 5 of the 2023 Atlantic Basin season). 6 hours of 1-minute GOES-16 Infrared images leading up to that time are shown above — and the 0100 UTC Infrared image with an overlay of Metop-C ASCAT surface scatterometer winds is shown below. Note: 25-km resolution ASCAT winds are available in AWIPS, which indicated a maximum speed of 75 knots — however, the Ultra-High Resolution (UHR) ASCAT wind product at that time (source) had a maximum speed of 136 knots.
Even though deep-layer wind shear was gradually increasing in its vicinity, Lee reached Category 5 intensity as it began to move across water with increasing values of Ocean Heat Content and Sea Surface Temperature (below).
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