I'm not so sure that Epsilon can't maintain itself for at least another day or so as a hurricane. It is sort of trapped just south of a skinny, narrow ridge axis to the north and west, with the strong polar jet located well to the north of the storm. There's a persistent blocking low at the tip of Greenland, something that should capture and pivot the next trough to the NW of the storm more toward the north than east with time. The system coming off of the eastern US coast -- as mentioned in the 10p NHC discussion -- is making more headway toward the east, but even it is still some distance away, currently oriented from Bermuda SW toward the central Bahamas.

A weak upper low located just to the southwest of Epsilon is sliding to the southwest in conjunction with the storm and may be helping to ward off some of the effects of the polar jet to the north and subtropical jet to the south. The subtropical jet extends from the southern Lesser Antilles, where an upper-level low is located, to the northeast toward the Madeira Islands. It's missing Epsilon right now and may continue to do so; the aforementioned upper low just southwest of the storm is on the cyclonic shear side of the jet and probably won't be negatively impacted.

Essentially, if this trough coming off of the east coast of the US lifts and misses the storm, I don't see any reason why Epsilon wouldn't continue to head toward the west-southwest back across the Atlantic. That's not what the models are forecasting right now, but they've been wrong before. Plus, model predictability is generally pretty low when there are one or more deep extratropical cyclones in the pattern -- as we have forecast now with one east of Greenland and one moving into Alaska. Safest bet, though, is to say that it'll dissipate in 2-3 days as the trough approaches it, but be watching the water vapor imagery closely over the next 24hr to see what happens. The pattern is amplifying somewhat across the US, with a trough digging into the west, but is probably not enough to significantly amplify the pattern in the eastern Atlantic and definitively kick Epsilon outta here -- but may just be enough to rip it to shreds.

It's definitely something to watch -- the best kind of December system. I know the NHC would probably rather just be done with Epsilon and the season as a whole, but frankly I say just sit back and enjoy the show.