Pangaea-like supercontinent - could it have a temperate climate if it has large seas inside?

Question

I have seen from various questions here (and from my research), that a Pangaea-like supercontinent would be very dry, with lots of deserts, since rainclouds couldn't travel a great distance inland.

However, I am pondering the possibility of worldbuilding a Pangaea-like supercontinent with a higher likelihood of temperate, life-favoring environments, by placing seas inland.

The most extreme example I can give is a donut-shaped supercontinent with an ocean at its center.

By bulding on this extreme example, we could gradually fill the central ocean with earth, but maintaining lots of great seas. These seas would be very large and interconnected between themselves, so that they would never dry.

For example, the Black Sea is a large sea connected with the Mediterranean Sea, which in turn is connected with the Atlantic Ocean. Multiply this phenomenum the number of times you wish, in order to create a vast network of large seas and you get the picture of what I'm getting at.

Would this produce the desired effect of creating a supercontinent with more mild climates?

Note: For this question's purposes, let's assume the majority of the landmass is located on equatorial and temperate latitudes, in an Earth-like planet.

Answer 1

Allow me to offer clarity to this mistaken view: Supercontinents do NOT need to be all desert.

What folks typically mean is that Supercontinents tend to be dryer in the middle. What that means is that, as rainclouds flow from the sea inland, they'll drop all their rain closer to the coasts. This goes true for most continents, though: in North America, forests line the coasts, and prairies and deserts are nestled in the center. In Asia, there's a desert in the middle of the continent northwards of the Himalayas. Heck, Australia is a desert surrounded by shrub forests.

The key to understanding this is geography and climate.

Here's a diagram of how winds work on a rotating planet (let's call it Earth, for simplicity's sake). As you can see, there are places where wind flows to and away from, due to the convection of air currents. Where winds tend to flow towards, there'll be greater chances of rain, and thus forests. Where the wind flows away, there'll be less rain, and therefore more deserts. You can see this in the simulated image of Pangea above. even though it's all one continent, there's a clear band of forests dividing the desert where the equator roughly is.

In addition, whenever rain hits a mountain face, there will be a rain shadow. The rains will all be deposited on the windward side of the mountain, whereas the opposite side will be considerably dryer. The best example of this is the Himalayas; the Monsoons of India are all bottled up by the mountains, which leaves the Gobi Desert to the north dry and barren.

So ultimately this is what determines your world's climate. It depends on the shape of the land, and how the winds hit it. Even if all the continents are together in one great landmass, it's rarely so simple as it seems. If you can determine where the mountains and lakes exist, then that'll determine the deserts and forests.

Hope this helps, I'd love to help more if ya need it!