Sea surface temperature is the temperature of the top millimeter of the ocean’s surface. Sea surface temperatures influence weather, including hurricanes, as well as plant and animal life in the ocean. Like Earth’s land surface, sea surface temperatures are warmer near the equator and colder near the poles. Currents like giant rivers move warm and cold water around the world’s oceans. Some of these currents flow on the surface, and they are obvious in sea surface temperature images. These data are collected by an ongoing series of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites as part of the NOAA/NASA Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) Pathfinder Program.

View the complete collection and read more about this dataset on NEO.

We have four new datasets that have just been added to the collection:

Land surface temperature is how hot the ground feels to the touch. If you want to know whether temperatures at some place at a specific time of year are unusually warm or cold, you need to compare them to the average temperatures for that place over many years. These maps show the average weekly or monthly, daytime or nighttime land surface temperatures for 2001-2010.

An anomaly is when something is different from average. These anomaly maps show where Earth’s surface was warmer or cooler during the day or night than the average temperatures for the same week or month from 2001-2010. For example, a daytime land surface temperature anomaly map for May 2002 would show how that month’s daytime temperature was different from the average temperature for all Mays between 2001 and 2010.

These maps show where and how much sunlight fell on Earth’s surface during the time period indicated. Scientists call this measure solar insolation. Knowing how much of the Sun’s energy reaches the surface helps scientists understand weather and climate patterns as well as patterns of plant growth around our world. Solar insolation maps are also useful to engineers who design solar panels and batteries designed to convert energy from the Sun into electricity to power appliances in our homes and work places.

NEO now provides daily, weekly, and monthly composites of total column ozone from July 2006 to present.

View the complete collection and read more about global temperature anomaly on NEO.

The NEO Web Map Service implementation strives to open up the NEO collection to users who wish to access its contents via machine-to-machine interaction. WMS gives users the ability to access maps from any implementing service using a standardized programming interface.

Read more about NEO WMS.