IMPORTANT USER ALERT (2 July 2024): This past weekend, a storage server at NOAA's Center for Satellite Applications and Research, which delivers the NOAA Coral Reef Watch data, suffered a hardware failure. The issue is being addressed, and we hope to have the NOAA Coral Reef Watch data back up and running as soon as possible. (1) The most recent data will be made available first; historical data may take time to be restored. (2) If you need specific data that are not yet available, please contact us at coralreefwatch@noaa.gov. (3) If you use code to pull data, please revise your code to use “…/socd/…” in lieu of “…/sod/…” in all relevant web addresses for all future needs. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.




Satellites & Bleaching

5km Sea Surface Temperature (SST) Anomaly Product

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5km SST Anomaly Product  |  What is an anomaly?

Below, we provide a bit more detail about the concept of an "anomaly". If you feel comfortable with this term, please feel free to proceed to the next section.

An anomaly is nothing more than the difference from a mean or average value. The example diagram below shows nine data measurements as purple stars, and the mean of the measurements is a solid blue line.

time series graph

The anomaly for each data point is simply the difference from the mean value. In the diagram below, the anomalies are represented by the length of the orange lines.

time series graph

When we talk about our daily global 5km Sea Surface Temperature (SST) Anomaly product, we are talking about the difference between a 5km satellite SST value and the mean (average) 5km satellite SST for a specific location on a specific day of the year. A positive anomaly means that the temperature at the ocean's surface is warmer than the mean; a negative anomaly means that the temperature at the surface is cooler than the mean.


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