Current Status
Nominal
High-resolution SST telemetry active across 18 regional basins.
Monitoring Nodes
1,420+
Autonomous Argo floats and moored ocean buoys synched.
Baseline Reference
1982-2025
Climatological cumulative thermal stress indicators.
About The Observational Initiative
Marine heatwaves (MHWs) are prolonged discrete anomalously warm water events that can have devastating impacts on marine ecosystems and socio-economic activities. The MHW Collaborative Initiative provides open access observational datasets and thermal anomaly indexes calculated using daily optimal interpolation sea surface temperatures (OISST).
Our distributed computing infrastructure ingests global satellite observations to quantify event duration, cumulative intensity, and rate of onset in near-real-time.