5 JULY -- SST Hotspots With the 1997 El Nino becoming extremely robust [especially for July!], HotSpots appear to becoming less potent over the Eastern Hemisphere. The Gulf of Aden and southern Red Sea had been exhibiting higher than normal SSTs in June, as did the Gulf of Oman south of the Arabian Gulf, but now these regions seem to be cooling a bit, and their respective HotSpots shrinking. In the tropical eastern Pacific, as El Nino continues to expand, this HotSpot product may reveal the exceptional warmth of the present ENSO episode even better than the SST anomaly, since the HotSpot product uses a constant highest monthly mean for its comparison. AES