A 3D View of Our Warming Seas

An impressive new 3D globe visualization allows you to explore how the oceans are warming day by day. The Global Sea Surface Temperature map displays daily ocean temperatures and anomalies - how much warmer or cooler each part of the ocean is compared to its long-term average - on an interactive, animated globe.

Built by Gary Oberbrunner, this visualization draws on daily global ocean temperature data from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. The result is an extraordinary, near-real-time look at the ocean’s surface temperature across the entire planet.

🔥 Visualizing Ocean Heat and Climate Change

Sea surface temperature is one of the most important indicators of climate change. The oceans store and move vast amounts of heat, influencing weather patterns, storm intensity, rainfall, and even the chemistry of the seas. This interactive globe helps to make those patterns dramatically visible.

The globe provides two key visual layers:

• SST Map - Shows current sea surface temperatures across the world.
• SST Anomaly Map - Displays how much warmer or cooler each location is compared to the 1971–2000 average.

You can rotate the globe manually or enable auto-rotation for a smooth global tour. There’s also an animation mode that lets you play through data from December 2023 to October 2025, revealing the evolution of ocean heat during the record-breaking years of 2023 and 2024.

🔥 What the Map Reveals

Ocean temperatures have been steadily climbing since 1981, with a dramatic surge beginning in 2023. April 2024 marked the highest sea surface temperature ever recorded, and January 2024 set the record for the largest anomaly from the long-term mean - records that may soon be surpassed.

Climate Central's Ocean Warming Stripes show the alarming extent to which average global sea surface temperatures have risen in the 21st Century, compared to the norm of annual global temperatures dating back to 1850. In this visualization, each year since 1850 is represented by a colored stripe. The color of each stripe is determined by the average global sea surface temperature. As you can see, there has been a steady increase in global sea surface temperatures this century - and an alarming spike in temperatures in the last 3-4 years.