HOUSTON — Otis underwent an extraordinary period of rapid intensification over the last 24 hours before making landfall along Mexico's Pacific coast as a catastrophic category 5 storm hurricane.
As of the 10 a.m. advisory from the National Hurricane Center on Tuesday Otis was a high end tropical storm with sustained winds of 70mph. Just 12 hours later at 10pm it had rapidly intensified into a Category 5 hurricane with sustained winds of 160mph!
So what exactly is rapid intensification?
According to the National Hurricane Center it is defined as an increase in maximum sustained winds of 30 knots or 34 miles per hour over a 24 hour period. As you can see above, Otis satisfied that definition in about a 6 hour period.
What made Otis become so strong, so fast? It was a situation where all atmospheric conditions were ideally favorable at the same time, something that is very hard to do.
A combination of extremely warm, deep ocean water off Mexico's Pacific coast provided plenty of fuel for an intensifying tropical cyclone. That warm water ran deep meaning that despite significant upwelling (mixing of the ocean waters from the storm's wave action) the storm was able to be sufficiently fueled by warm waters throughout its lifecycle.
A lack of any wind shear aided in ideal ventilation of the storm, meaning it was vertically stacked and able to completely take advantage of the prime environmental conditions.
What's even more fascinating is that Otis is just the latest in an eastern Pacific season that has been super active to say the least. Otis was the 2nd category 5 in the basin this year, that's not unprecedented, back in 2018 there were 3!
