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Hurricane Epsilon weakens back into tropical storm

Posted on: Sunday, 4 December 2005, 09:27 CST

MIAMI (Reuters) - Hurricane Epsilon, the 14th hurricane of a record-breaking Atlantic storm season, weakened back into a tropical storm on Sunday as it drifted eastward over open waters, U.S. forecasters said.

The storm posed no threat to land and its maximum sustained winds had dropped to 70 mph (110 kph), just below the threshold for it to be categorized as a hurricane, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

Epsilon was around 790 miles west-southwest of Portugal's Azores islands by 4 a.m. EST (0900 GMT) and moving east at 13 mph (20 kph). The cyclone was expected to loop back to the southwest after a couple of days and dissipate.

The 2005 Atlantic hurricane season officially ended on Wednesday but it is not altogether unusual for tropical storms to form in December. In other ways, however, the 2005 season has been extremely unusual.

Epsilon, the sixth hurricane to occur in December since records began in 1851, was named like its four predecessors for a letter in the Greek alphabet after the official list of storm names for 2005 was exhausted.

This season saw the most tropical storms on record -- 26 -- and the most hurricanes, with 14. The highest number of hurricanes previously on record was 12, in 1969, and the highest number of named storms was 21, in 1933.

The long-term average is 10 storms per season, six of which become hurricanes.

This year also set a record of three Category 5 storms -- the most powerful on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity -- including Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans and killed more than 1,200 in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Hurricane Wilma in October became the strongest hurricane ever observed in the Atlantic, and Vince in October the first tropical storm known to have come ashore in southern Spain.

While most climatologists agree that the large number of storms can be blamed on a natural and periodic switch in climatic conditions, some experts say there are signs global warming could be increasing the intensity of storms.

Source: REUTERS

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