Sea surface temperature & marine heatwaves
Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST and ERSST through ERDDAP: daily maps, anomalies and baselines, marine heatwaves, coral bleaching heat stress, El Niño indices, trends, buoys against satellites, and the longitude, packing and weighting traps.
Sea surface temperature is one of the best-observed climate variables: NOAA’s daily OISST since 1981 and monthly ERSST since 1854, served by ERDDAP servers that answer a URL with exactly the region and dates asked for. The guides here download it, map anomalies and trends, detect marine heatwaves, measure coral bleaching heat stress with Coral Reef Watch, compute the El Niño index, compare buoys with satellites, and fix the traps of longitude conventions, packed values, base periods and missing days.
Every number comes from a run. June 2023 off western Ireland was a severe marine heatwave, 3.74 °C above the seasonal normal; August 2026 is the warmest month in ERSST’s global record, 0.67 °C above 1991–2020, as El Niño builds; and one ERDDAP copy of OISST turned out to be missing 1,194 days, which is why the guides count days before trusting a series.
🧭 Start with the concepts
The ideas the how-to guides below assume you already have.
⚙️ Then do the task
Step-by-step walkthroughs with code you can copy and adapt.
- How to Download NOAA OISST Sea Surface Temperature in Python
- How to Detect Marine Heatwaves in Python
- How to Map Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies in Python
- How to Compare Buoy Water Temperature with Satellite SST in Python
- How to Compute an El Niño Index from Sea Surface Temperature in Python
- How to Map Marine Heatwave Days in Python
Show every how-to guide in this topic
- How to Map Coral Bleaching Heat Stress with Degree Heating Weeks in Python
- How to Map Sea Surface Temperature Trends in Python
- How to Compute the Global Mean Sea Surface Temperature in Python
- How to Extract a Sea Surface Temperature Time Series at a Point in Python
- How to Detect Ocean Temperature Fronts in Python
- How to Map the Seasonal Cycle of Sea Surface Temperature in Python
🔧 When it breaks
The errors this topic produces, with the cause explained rather than just the command.
Related topics
Subjects that keep coming up alongside this one, most overlap first.