About
Yearly ocean heat from NOAA, in plain language — built for internal review and sharing.
What this version includes
Every panel on the dashboard is finished and backed by data. Nothing on the main page is a placeholder.
- Total heat since 1955 and yearly KPIs from NOAA (refreshed regularly; NOAA adds new years a few times per year).
- Global and basin charts from the same NOAA files.
- Everyday comparison cards (bombs, US energy, hurricanes) calculated on this site from NOAA’s cumulative total — teaching scale only.
- News headlines from Google News (keywords only; does not affect any number on the charts).
Not in this version (and why)
- Daily sea surface temperature map — Would require downloading and processing NOAA’s large gridded OISST files (NetCDF), not the simple yearly text files we use now. No API key for NOAA’s public OISST data; Copernicus marine maps would need a free Copernicus account if we chose that route instead. Left out so the dashboard only shows complete panels.
- Southern & Arctic basin lines — NOAA publishes them; we show Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian in v1 to keep the basin chart readable.
- Separate pages per basin or depth layer — Future scope; all v1 content is on one dashboard.
How we get the data
This is not a live buoy or weather API. We refresh from NOAA’s published files and copy the numbers here. The update date is when we last refreshed the page — not necessarily when NOAA published a new year.
Open any ⓘ on the dashboard for what each number means and where it comes from.
How to read the numbers
- ZJ (zettajoule) — a unit of energy. The ocean’s heat gain is enormous; ZJ keeps the digits readable.
- Heat vs baseline — how much more heat the ocean holds than NOAA’s reference period, not “sea temperature right now.”
- 0–700 m vs 0–2000 m — shallower layer has data back to 1955; deeper layer is trustworthy from about 2005.
- Year-on-year gain — extra heat in one year compared with the previous year, not the total since 1955.
Sources
- NOAA NCEI Ocean Heat Content
- NOAA ocean heat data files
- Google News RSS — headlines
- Cross-check: IAP/CAS annual assessments