Tropical Storm Lee Forms in the Atlantic. But It’s Too Soon to Worry.

Over the Labor Day weekend, social media feeds flooded with stark warnings about a major storm slamming the East Coast of the United States next week. That hypothetical storm just became Tropical Storm Lee with sustained winds of 50 miles per hour late Tuesday, according to the National Hurricane Center.

Before you freak out, it is far too early to say with any degree of certainty that a major hurricane will make landfall along the Eastern Seaboard.

On Tuesday morning, Lee was a tropical depression moving west-northwest at 15 miles per hour in a remote area of the central Atlantic, where computer models that were run over the weekend indicated that it would become a hurricane. Those models had some social media users in a tizzy predicting the depression’s becoming Tropical Storm Lee and possibly hitting the U.S. East Coast as a hurricane.

That is understandable. Meteorologists have been watching the system since it began to appear in computer models before the holiday weekend.

If it has an impact on land, the earliest would be this weekend in the Leeward Islands in the northeastern…