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Post-season Tropical Storm Zeta forms in Atlantic

Posted on: Saturday, 31 December 2005, 02:17 CST

By Jane Sutton

MIAMI (Reuters) - Tropical Storm Zeta formed in the eastern Atlantic Ocean on Friday, a month after the official end of a record busy hurricane season but forecasters said the straggler storm did not threaten land.

Zeta was the 27th named storm of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, which officially ended on November 30.

At noon EDT (1700 GMT), Zeta was centered about 1,070 miles

southwest of the Portuguese islands of the Azores and moving northwest near 8 mph (13 kph). It had top sustained winds of 50 mph (85 kph) and could strengthen briefly before fizzling during the weekend, forecasters at the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said.

Tropical storms thrive when the seas are warm, so December storms are unusual though not unprecedented in the northern Atlantic. Six tropical storms have strengthened into hurricanes in December since record-keeping began in 1851, including Epsilon earlier this month.

Zeta closed out a record-setting year that forced forecasters to choose storm names from the Greek alphabet after exhausting their annual list of 21 names.

"It seems like the final little check mark for this year," said Martin Nelson, a lead forecaster at the hurricane center. "I think it'll be the last."

The old record for most tropical storms was 21, set in 1933. Fourteen of this year's storms strengthened into hurricanes, breaking the old record of 12 set in 1969.

The year also saw the most expensive hurricane on record when Hurricane Katrina swamped New Orleans and the U.S. Gulf coast in August, killing at least 1,300 people and causing more than $80 billion of damage.

Source: REUTERS

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