Show HN: 41 years sea surface temperature anomalies

willmeyers 140 points 61 comments April 09, 2026
ssta.willhelps.org · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (16 comments)

Gravityloss

Awesome! Maybe there could be even larger speeds and timesteps.

imagetic

More of this!

zug_zug

Very emotionally powerful to watch something play out, even if I'm already consciously aware of it. Would love a speed where I can watch the whole dataset play out in about 1 minute.

HumblyTossed

We're frogs, slowly boiling ourselves...

callumprentice

I made something like this (in the VERY broadest sense) 10 years ago - inspired me to revisit and update both visuals and data (a lot has changed in that time). https://callumprentice.github.io/apps/global_temperature_cha... and https://callumprentice.github.io/apps/climate_temperature_ch...

mckirk

Along these lines: I really like the 'Climate Reanalyzer' project by the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine [1]. There's so much good stuff there if you click around a bit; you can create custom plots for the surface temperature of different regions for example[2], which quickly shows you that Western Europe has actually warmed a lot more than the global average, and we're closer to +2°C already in that region. [1]: https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=world2 [2]: https://climatereanalyzer.org/research_tools/monthly_tseries...

rob_c

Serious question. Why are there static (in absolute positional terms) anomalies in the data that seem to be recording at the other end of the spectrum to their immediate surrounding waters? Also nice to see several shipping lanes crop up when watching it.

cjauvin

For those interested in this type of climate data visualization apps, I have worked on this one in the past, which is actively maintained with a lot of love, and very nice: https://portraits.ouranos.ca/en

illwrks

Very nice. I had a quick look at the data source and I wonder if the more recent data is more sensitive/better quality since 2020? There's a clear trend of the oceans getting warmer but recently it seems like there's more and more heat retained. "CRW's first-generation global monitoring products were operational at NOAA until April 30, 2020, when they were officially retired, and succeeded by CRW's next-generation operational daily monitoring products."

ferfumarma

This is all terrifying data.

metalman

The OG, SST https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/products/ocean/sst/contour/

pimlottc

This looks cool but it's missing a clear legend on the default view to help the viewer understand what they're looking at. It's not immediately clear if it's just absolute temperatures or relative temperatures or what. You have to look at the color scale to notice that it's from -5 to +5. But relative to what? Over what timescale? Is it a moving average? I guess I could dig into the data link to figure it out but most people aren't going to do that.

adcent

I jumped to my birth date and found it's much colder than today.

croemer

In case you wonder how the anomaly is calculated: The daily global 5km SSTA product requires a daily climatology to calculate the daily SST anomalies. Daily climatologies (DC) are derived from the monthly mean (MM) climatology via linear interpolation. To achieve this, we assigned the MM value to the 15th day of each corresponding month, with the individual days between these dates being derived using linear interpolation. We then calculate the SSTA product using: SST_anomaly = SST - DC where the SST is the value for the day in question, and DC is the corresponding daily climatology for that day of the year.

marginalx

I don't quite understand the temperature color scale of -5 to 5, what is the baseline here on -5 to 5, is it relative to global average of that day? Or a period of time?

kittikitti

This is great, thank you for posting this!

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