Hurricane Epsilon defies explanation

From Jeff Master: http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/show.html

Epsilon refuses to obey the rules. Not only has Epsilon refused to die as expected--it has strengthened in the past day to near Category 2 strength. Epsilon is traversing 22-23C waters, which are a full four degrees C (7 F) below what is normally thought of as the minimum needed to allow a hurricane to strengthen. The upper level winds are unfavorable--Epsilon was been under 20 knots of shear the past two days. It is unusual to see a hurricane intensify in the face of 20 knots of shear (although Wilma managed to do so). It is unheard of for a hurricane to intensify in the face of 20 knots of shear, and with 22C water temperatures under it. Like I've been saying about this entire Hurricane Season of 2005, the normal rules do not apply. Epsilon is another storm that we do not understand, and I hope someone out there in grad school is taking data on this storm and writing a Ph.D. thesis on it!

Epsilon will continue to hang around most of the week. A strong ridge of high pressure has built over it, forcing it on a eastward track that will keep it from passing over really cold 20C waters to the northeast that would have surely killed it. By Wednesday, this ridge of high pressure is expected to force Epsilon southward and then southwestward towards warmer waters. However, by this point, the shear over Epsilon should be somewhere near 40 knots, which should be able to rip the storm apart. This should put a end once and for all to the Hurricane Season of 2005. I don't expect anything else to develop this month, since forecast wind shear levels over the Caribbean Sea the next ten days are now looking only marginally favorable for tropical storm formation.

Jeff Masters

(emphasis added)

'the things we don't know we don't know...' as Rummy would put it.

>> It is unusual to see a hurricane intensify in the face of 20 knots of shear (although Wilma managed to do so). It is unheard of for a hurricane to intensify in the face of 20 knots of shear, and with 22C water temperatures under it. <<

Until now I've always assumed that the anomalies of this year's hurricane season were most likely caused by the unusually high water temperatures. And global warming certainly factored into possible explanations for this rise in water temp and increasing intensity of hurricane strength.

But now it I get the uneasy feeling that there is something MORE, something beyond the rise in temps. Here is a hurricane persisting and stengthening DESPITE the normal constraints of wind shear and temp. WTF?

It's another humbling reminder that we can't grasp the full dynamics of global climate and that destabilizing climate has unleashed even more mysterious forces than we imagined.

"By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes."

--From Macbeth (IV, i, 44-45)

I remember my first epiphany in this regard was my college anthropology class. Some theories I was taught back then as the 'gospel' were demolished by subsequent digs yet the updated information is never strongly presented in the context of "As far as anyone knows."
It is presented as the 'new gospel.'
The spectre of fallibility is too scary for those writing doctorals. With this in mind, science
is still my religion...and Shakespeare is my man.

seems like a key difference, and it doesn't appear to be explainable by extra-high ocean temps, since ocean temps aren't really extra high this time of year, in absolute terms. If this were still August, with surface temps at a historic 90F, you might think that high temperatures were just swamping the wind-shear. But Wilma and Epsilon intensified over significantly lower water-temps. Nothing record-breaking (time of year excluded), and yet they seemed insensitive to shear.