Well, Happy New Year and welcome Zeta to the first storm of 2006!

Looking at Sat images, Zeta looks almost as good again as it did last night, and far better than it looked mid-day today. Convection is strong and appears to be wrapping—albiet weakly so—the core low pressure. You can see a hole appearing right on the SW edge of the convection mass half overlaping out to sea. This is located in approximately the same location as the current estimated position on the SSD Tropical Forcast overlay. I'd say that the core is at least partially still under the convective mass, but over 50% exposed. It's amazing Zeta is hanging on as well as it is. Given it's tenacity, if there wasn't shear we could see a strengthening storm that might have hit minimal hurricane strength. As it is, the shear will continue to limit it, and eventually rip it appart. If, somehow, it manages to survive the shear, we could still see some minor strengthening in several days. I doubt it will survive the shear though, but then, given the past few months of cold water Atlantic storms, I wouldn't count on that.

--RC

P.S. - one change to the forums I'd like to see is the allowance of HTML special characters such as —, °, etc. That would make it so much easier to type out posts