Current Weather

Weather is the fastest thing this map draws. The ocean layers come from forecasts rebuilt every few hours and published here hourly; the radar behind this page is the National Weather Service’s own service, asked for by your browser as you look at it, and its mosaics are rebuilt about every two minutes. Press Play and the last two hours run in about twenty seconds, or drag the slider to a scan and read the time beside it.

The three layers answer different questions and are worth reading together. The wind is a forecast — where the air is going, at 10 m, from the ECMWF open data at a quarter degree. The air temperature at 2 m is from the same run and shows the fronts the wind is blowing across. The radar is not a forecast at all: it is a measurement of what is falling, now, and it is the only layer on this map that owes nothing to a model.

The radar reaches the United States and its territories, and nowhere else. It is five regional mosaics — the continental states, Alaska, Hawaii, the Caribbean and Guam — so over the open ocean the layer is blank because there is no radar there, not because the weather is clear. The readout beside the slider says none in view when you have panned outside coverage, because those two are not the same thing and a blank map cannot tell you which it means.

Waves are one switch away and belong with this page’s three. ECWAM is ECMWF’s wave model, run beside the IFS the wind and air temperature come from, so a sea state here is the same forecast as the wind above it rather than a second opinion. It is the one field on the map from an atmospheric centre that is masked to the ocean: there are no waves on land, so the model does not compute it and the coastline shows through.

Everything else the map can draw is one switch away too, including the ocean underneath: sea-surface temperature, the currents, the gliders and floats working in that water. This page differs from the others only in what it opens with.

Where the data comes from

The same feeds as the tropical cyclone page, which is the same map opened on a different set of layers. Everything here is credited in the map’s own attribution line as it draws, and listed once below.

Weather

• ECMWF IFS — 10 m wind, 2 m air temperature and total cloud cover, 1/4° open forecast data, licensed CC BY 4.0
• ECMWF ECWAM — significant wave height, 1/4°, from the wave model run alongside the IFS
• NASA GIBS / NOAA GOES — ABI GeoColor and Band 13 clean infrared, two layers from whichever of GOES-East and GOES-West covers the view, reprojected to Web Mercator by NASA and served at ten-minute steps; the observed cloud beside the forecast one
• NOAA/NWS NEXRAD — base reflectivity, the five regional mosaics, fetched by your browser and animated over the last two hours

Ocean

• US Navy ESPC-D-V02 — 1/12° global forecast, via HYCOM’s OPeNDAP: currents at the surface and at 50 m, sea-surface temperature, salinity and sea ice
• Mercator Ocean / Copernicus Marine — 1/12° global analysis and forecast, a SECOND model of the same ocean: currents at five depths, temperature, salinity and sea surface height. Published beside the Navy’s rather than instead of it, so two independent forecasts can be compared; its levels are 47, 186, 380 and 1062 m, which are near the Navy’s 50, 200, 350 and 1000 m but not the same water
• NOAA PSL OISST v2.1 — observed sea-surface temperature and ice concentration, 1/4° daily, and temperature’s departure from the 1991–2020 daily normal

Platforms

• NOAA National Hurricane Center — storms, forecast cones, and the areas under a tropical weather outlook, for the Atlantic and the eastern and central Pacific
• Japan Meteorological Agency — typhoons in the western North Pacific, with the 70% probability circle JMA publishes at each forecast time. Ten-minute winds, where the two American agencies use one-minute
• Joint Typhoon Warning Center — tropical cyclones in the Indian Ocean and the southern hemisphere, read from the NOAA/NWS mirror of its warnings. No forecast cone: JTWC publishes none
• US IOOS Glider DAC, NOC/BODC, OTN and VOTO — glider positions
• Rolling Deck to Repository — the US academic research fleet registry, which names the vessels the GTS reports as bare call signs
• SAMOS (Florida State University) — one-minute underway positions from most of the academic fleet, which is what makes a vessel track a course rather than an 11 km staircase; about half a day behind, so the last hours of each track are still the GTS
• Schmidt Ocean Institute — RV Falkor (too) relayed from the ship herself, at one minute and full precision
• SondeHub (CC BY-SA 2.0) — radiosondes currently aloft, from a volunteer network of receivers rather than the WMO, so it sees about 40% of the world’s twice-daily launches and almost none outside Europe, North America, Japan and Australia
• NOAA PMEL — uncrewed surface vehicle positions
• NOAA OSMC — uncrewed surface vehicles when PMEL is unreachable, with the wind, pressure and wave height each one is reporting
• Ifremer Argo GDAC — Argo float positions
• NOAA National Data Buoy Center — moored buoys and coastal stations, each with its latest wind, pressure, temperature and wave observations
• NOAA CO-OPS — tide gauges: the observed water level against the predicted tide, their difference, and the next high and low
• NOAA PMEL’s GTMBA — the TAO/TRITON, RAMA and PIRATA tropical moored arrays, named from the program’s registry with each buoy’s latest report relayed over the GTS by NOAA OSMC

Seafloor, shoreline and reference

• GEBCO 2026 — bathymetry, both as the default basemap and as the depth contours
• EMODnet Bathymetry — shoreline
• Esri Ocean and OpenStreetMap — alternative basemaps
• Natural Earth — country and state borders, and the offline coastline basemap
• Marine Regions (VLIZ) — Exclusive Economic Zone boundaries