Climate change threatens even the best-protected and most-remote coral reef ecosystems. Management must now incorporate how various factors (e.g., benthic structure, currents and local upwelling, connectivity, herbivore abundance, thermal history) affect coral and reef resilience. More than a decade of research indicates that thermal history is among the most important factors influencing this resilience.

With support from the NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program, Coral Reef Watch (CRW) developed a variety of Thermal History metrics for coral reef management, initially released in July 2014. In the latest Version 3.6 (v3.6), several Sea Surface Temperature (SST) metrics are calculated for reef-containing locations and adjacent waters and are arranged into six themes: Stress Frequency, Stress Onset, SST Variability, SST Trend, Climatology, and Annual History.

The v3.6 metrics were derived from CRW's v3.1 daily global 5km (1/20°) CoralTemp satellite SST data product, for the period 1985-2024. Source data for CoralTemp are the NOAA/National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) operational near real-time Daily Global 5km Geostationary-Polar-orbiting (Geo-Polar) Blended Night-only SST Analysis, from October 2016 to present; the NOAA/NESDIS Daily Global 5km Geo-Polar Blended Night-only SST Reanalysis (a reprocessed dataset), from November 2002 to October 2016; and the Daily Global 5km Night-only SST Reanalysis produced by the United Kingdom Met Office, on the Operational SST and Sea Ice Analysis (OSTIA) system, from January 1985 to November 2002.