Tropical Storm Zeta

On December 30, 2005 Tropical Storm Zeta--the season's sixth storm named after a Greek letter--spun up over the Atlantic Ocean.

This is the 27th named storm of the record-breaking 2005 season, which saw 27 named storms. The conventional naming system uses just 21 letters of the alphabet--the last being "W"--and after Hurricane Wilma brewed in October 2005, forecasters turned to the Greek alphabet. Zeta is the sixth letter of that alphabet.

A tropical storm is characterized by winds of at least 39 miles (63 kilometers) per hour, and at this time Zeta had sustained winds of around 52 miles (82 kilometers) per hour. To be categorized as a hurricane, a storm needs winds of more than 74 miles (119 kilometers) per hour. As Tropical Storm Zeta formed, ocean temperatures didn't appear warm enough to escalate Zeta into a hurricane, and news reports described it as no immediate threat to any land areas.

One month after 2005's record-breaking storm season officially ended, this storm appeared roughly 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) to the southwest of the Azores Islands. This image was taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) flying onboard the Aqua satellite on January 2, 2006, at 16:05 UTC (roughly 2:05 p.m. local time).

--Bjorn Carey

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Credit: NASA MODIS Rapid Response team