This year has been very bad in
terms of tropical hurricanes in the Atlantic. The American NHC Nationa
Hurricane Centre normally names storms sequentially with the alphabet.
Leaving out names starting with awkward letters like Q and X, they have
room for 21 storms, quite adequate. Not in 2005. After hurricanes like
Katrina, Rita and Stan the Atlantic was still in spawning mood. The NHC
had to resort to its backup system: the Greek alphabet. To date, we
have progressed to hurricane Epsilon, which has been trundling around
in mid-Atlantic, 2000 km southwest of the Azores, with sustained
windspeeds of 120 kph. Although officially, the hurricane season is
over, the Atlantic flatly ignores that and comes up with Epsilon on
December 1st. Below image (copyright NHC/NOAA) shows its position at 4
a.m. EST (0900 GMT) on 5 December 2005. It's projected to shift
southwest, and lose its intensity.
Monday, 5 December 2005
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