By any measure, this was an extremely busy, kind of horrible hurricane season. From the impacts, as well as the meteorology perspective, this was an extreme, extreme year, and hopefully we will not see anything like it for a while.

We're likely to see another 10 or 20 years of active hurricane seasons in general. It's not going mean every season's going to be busy. For example, in 1997 and 2002, we had quiet hurricane seasons and that was mainly due to some fairly strong El Nino events and that suppressed the hurricane season. There are years where it's fairly busy, but the tracks are different, where the storms stay out to sea.

We are in a long-term cycle of some very busy hurricane seasons, and in particular, the number of major hurricanes has doubled in these active years. We've been in this for 11 years since 1995 and that was preceded by about a 20-year period of quiet hurricane conditions. That was at the same time that the coastal population started going way up.

That was kind of my first impression: Wow, this one is deepening as quick as Andrew, ... It's larger.

I think that this is very good science and a very important paper, but I don't think it settles every question.

Fortunately, Zeta is more of a curiosity than a life-threatening event.