Hank don't you think the key was the convection? Convection looked positively pitiful up until a couple hours ago, regardless of what other characteristics were there.

i didn't think so. it doesn't have as much convection as a tropical-origin system, but the stuff was 'organized' and clinging to the center, so the usual shear argument was out. a lot of tropical storms have a hard time doing that under the sort of shear this thing is under. it's also being analyzed as warm core, which removes the 'it's not tropical' argument. add to that that it clearly has strong winds... i dunno, what more do you need? not calling it a tropical cyclone is just playing games with meaning, and finding idiosyncrasies to twist conventional definitions. -HF