Hurricanes

A hurricane’s intensity depends on the ocean beneath it — on how much warm water the storm can draw from before its own mixing brings cooler water to the surface. That subsurface structure is what forecast models most need and least often have, and it is measured in the one place ships cannot safely work. Uncrewed platforms fill the gap: gliders profile temperature and salinity through the upper ocean and surface to report, while uncrewed surface vehicles ride out the storm at the air–sea interface, measuring winds, waves and fluxes. C4PO has flown gliders for hurricane monitoring in the Mid-Atlantic through MARACOOS and NOAA-supported deployments, and works on the next generation of uncrewed surface vehicles and their launch and recovery systems.

Data sources

Public feeds, refetched hourly and shown only where a platform has reported recently. The depth contours are the exception: computed once, since the seafloor does not change. Gridded fields carry the model run they came from. Color scale, range and contour opacity are yours to set.

Platforms

• NOAA National Hurricane Center — storm positions, forecast tracks and cones, and the observed track over the past ten days
• US IOOS Glider DAC — glider positions, United States
• 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
• NOC / BODC — glider positions, United Kingdom
• Ocean Tracking Network — glider positions, Canada
• Voice of the Ocean — glider positions, Sweden
• 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 and last profile time, over a twelve-day window
• 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

Ocean fields

• US Navy ESPC-D-V02 — 1/12° global forecast, via HYCOM’s OPeNDAP: currents at the surface and at 50 m, sea-surface temperature, and salinity
• NOAA PSL OISST v2.1 — observed sea-surface temperature, 1/4° daily, and its departure from the 1991–2020 daily normal
• 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 above. Masked to the ocean, because the model computes waves only where there is sea
• NOAA/NWS NEXRAD — base reflectivity, the five regional mosaics, live from the National Weather Service and animated over the last two hours. The only layer here the browser fetches for itself, so it is minutes old rather than an hour; it covers the United States and its territories and nothing else, so over open ocean it is legitimately blank

Seafloor and shoreline

• GEBCO 2026 — depth contours from 20 m to 10,000 m, from the 15 arc-second grid
• EMODnet Bathymetry — shoreline
• NOAA NCEI DEM global mosaic — seafloor depth at a point, on click

Boundaries

• Marine Regions (VLIZ) — Exclusive Economic Zone boundaries, and which country’s zone a point falls in

Basemaps

• GEBCO — global bathymetry, the default
• 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
• Esri Ocean — alternative bathymetry
• OpenStreetMap — alternative reference map
• Natural Earth — country and state borders, and the offline coastline basemap

Glider endpoints follow the OceanGliders regional list. Coriolis is not included — its glider archive is delayed mode, weeks behind — nor is Australia’s IMOS, which has no open endpoint.