Over the Labor Day weekend, social media feeds flooded with stark warnings a few main storm slamming the East Coast of the United States subsequent week. That hypothetical storm simply turned Tropical Storm Lee with sustained winds of 45 miles per hour on Tuesday afternoon, in line with the National Hurricane Center.

Before you freak out, it’s far too early to say with any diploma of certainty {that a} main hurricane will make landfall alongside the Eastern Seaboard.

On Tuesday morning, Lee was a tropical melancholy transferring west-northwest at 15 miles per hour in a distant space of the central Atlantic, the place pc fashions that had been run over the weekend indicated that it might grow to be a hurricane. Those fashions had some social media customers in a tizzy predicting the melancholy’s changing into Tropical Storm Lee and presumably hitting the U.S. East Coast as a hurricane.

That is comprehensible. Meteorologists have been watching the system because it started to appear in pc fashions earlier than the vacation weekend.

If it has an affect on land, the earliest can be this weekend within the Leeward Islands within the northeastern Caribbean.

Some of the largest hurricanes to hit the East Coast, like an unnamed hurricane that hit Long Island in 1938, or Hugo, which made landfall in South Carolina in 1989, started in an analogous area of the central Atlantic, removed from land. This storm is predicted to grow to be a robust hurricane, if not a serious hurricane, and it’ll monitor west towards the United States. It may make landfall alongside the Eastern Seaboard, however it’s simply as possible, or presumably much more possible, that it’s going to keep out to sea and away from the U.S. East Coast.

Social media posts a few hypothetical storm’s avoiding land aren’t usually shared as a lot as a picture of a forecast mannequin that exhibits a serious storm 14 days away from hitting a serious U.S. metropolis. That is why scary posts, reminiscent of one which warned of a “horrendous situation for the East Coast of the United States,” took off this weekend.

For now, there are too many unknowns and too many issues that might change earlier than the storm comes near North America. It is probably going that this will likely be an enormous storm and that it’s going to transfer west earlier than it turns north after which northeast. The query is when will it make that flip.

It all has to do with the steering currents, and as of Tuesday morning the pc forecast fashions had been indicating an earlier flip towards the north and northeast. That would put Bermuda extra in danger than the United States or Canada. More will likely be often called extra knowledge is collected this week and that knowledge is integrated into the pc fashions.

Even if this storm doesn’t make a direct landfall wherever, it’s more likely to trigger rip currents and massive waves alongside the U.S. East Coast subsequent week. This storm is value monitoring, however not value freaking out about.