I think the storm is going to be around a bit longer. Until The eyewall collapses, I think the storm will create enough of it's own Environment to keep things together. If I had a theory on why the storm has held together so well.

1) The Storm is in steady state, The low water tempratures are death to a system that is disrupted, but for a system that's together, the tempratures don't have to be a magical number.

1a) The storm has also not drifted into REALLY cold water, which most storms usually do once they head off to the norht and east, this storm managed to keep from 'falling off the deep end' so to speak

Tying it all together, A low shear environment, and a storm that has managed to aquire shallow but warmcore characteristics. upper level shear, does almost nothing to this storm. There's no way a storm could *form* like this, but once formed, as we've seen before, storms are tenacious buggers. and without shear or super cold temps. there's no reason for it not to keep going.

of course, I'm also looking at this in hindsight. So maybe in the future in a similar circumstance it won't catch us quite by suprise. I also notice they keep the storm a hurricane for another 24 hours before weakening it. And I suspect the Mets over at the NHC are just ... shruging their shoulders in bemusement. I'd love to see an 'unoffical' blog from a few of them. just to see what their internal thoughts are. particularly in wacky circumstances like this.

-Mark