Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci., 21, 837–859, 2021 https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-21-837-2021 © Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Oceanic response to the consecutive Hurricanes Dorian and Humberto (2019) in the Sargasso Sea Dailé Avila-Alonso1,2, Jan M. Baetens2, Rolando Cardenas1, and Bernard De Baets2 1Laboratory of Planetary Science, Department of Physics, Universidad Central “Marta Abreu” de Las Villas, 54830, Santa Clara, Villa Clara, Cuba 2KERMIT, Department of Data Analysis and Mathematical Modelling, Faculty of Bioscience Engineering, Ghent University, 9000 Ghent, Belgium Correspondence: Dailé Avila-Alonso (
[email protected]) Received: 7 September 2020 – Discussion started: 27 October 2020 Revised: 18 December 2020 – Accepted: 13 January 2021 – Published: 2 March 2021 Abstract. Understanding the oceanic response to tropical cy- 1 Introduction clones (TCs) is of importance for studies on climate change. Although the oceanic effects induced by individual TCs have been extensively investigated, studies on the oceanic re- Hurricanes and typhoons (or more generally, tropical cy- sponse to the passage of consecutive TCs are rare. In this clones (TCs)) are among the most destructive natural phe- work, we assess the upper-oceanic response to the passage of nomena on Earth, leading to great social and economic losses Hurricanes Dorian and Humberto over the western Sargasso (Welker and Faust, 2013; Lenzen et al., 2019), as well as eco- Sea in 2019 using satellite remote sensing and modelled data. logical perturbations of both marine and terrestrial ecosys- We found that the combined effects of these slow-moving tems (Fiedler et al., 2013; de Beurs et al., 2019; Lin et al., TCs led to an increased oceanic response during the third 2020).