Hi. Newly registered user here who has followed Charlie the last few days through this forum. I'd first like to say that I'm amazed with the meteorological knowledge displayed on this web site. I'm an amateur hurricane tracker, and have learned quite a bit about the nitty-gritty physics of hurricanes just by reading posts here. Though I'm sure my words don't carry a lot of weight, I would just like to say what a good job posters have been doing here.

I would like to make a brief comment on Danielle and Earl. It seems to me to be quite rare for the the first five tropical depressions of a season to all develop into named storms. Furthermore, if Danielle and Earl do develop into hurricanes (as expected), isn't this also unusual that four of the five depressions have developed into hurricanes?

Finally, given that we are just now approaching the peak of the hurricane season, I am wondering if we might actually exceed the recent updated 2004 hurricane forecast of 7 hurricanes, 3 major. Is it possible to end up having 8-9 hurricanes with 4-5 being major (given that it is only mid-August)? I would be interested in anyone's thoughts on this...