As an additional follow-up on the previous post regarding Otis, you may recall it seems as though the sort of sea surface warmth we saw that Otis passed over ended up being fairly unremarkable and actually quite common for this time of year in that part of the world.
We can also couch this warmth in terms of historical sea temperatures going further back in time as seen from three different sea reanalyses. Again here we take the same sea region that Otis passed over and look at the average October sea temperature in the region. The dashed orange line represents this year’s sea temperature around the time of Otis just for context.
So as we’ve previously discussed, whilst it’s clear that this sort of sea temperature is fairly common now, it’s not always been the case in the past. Once again, the die is loaded towards warmer seas in a warmer environment; the sort of warm seas that can support the sort of rapid intensification that was seen in association with Otis.
