The Arctic Ocean

• The map opens centered on the north pole with 135°E at the top — the orientation sea-ice figures are conventionally drawn in, so Greenland sits below the pole, Alaska and the Bering Strait to the upper left and Siberia to the upper right.
• Up, under the map, turns it: the longitude you choose runs up the screen. The page reloads when you let go of the slider, because the projection is fixed when the map is built — it comes back where you were looking, at the zoom you were at, with every layer as you left it, rotated. Your orientation is kept, and a link you copy carries it.
• Sea ice is drawn over the sea-surface temperature rather than instead of it: below 15% concentration the ice layer paints nothing, so the water shows through and the edge of the pack is where the two meet.
• Only the vector coastline is offered as a basemap here. The tiled bathymetry and street maps are pictures of Web Mercator and cannot be redrawn on this plane, so they are not in the list.
• Right-click, or press and hold on a touchscreen, to read the position, the seafloor depth and whichever fields are switched on wherever you point.
• Your layers, colors and view are kept for this page on its own — separately from the Southern Ocean and from the global map, so the three do not overwrite each other.

Sea ice concentration and thickness, currents, temperature and salinity come from the US Navy ESPC-D-V02 forecast; NOAA PSL OISST v2.1 supplies the observed temperature and its own ice concentration, and the SST anomaly is that analysis against its 1991–2020 normal. ECMWF IFS open data supplies 10 m wind, 2 m air temperature and total cloud cover, and ECWAM the wave height. The land, the ice shelves and the glaciated areas are Natural Earth; GEBCO Compilation Group supplies the depth contours. The platforms reporting from these waters are the Argo array via the Ifremer Argo GDAC, ocean gliders from the US IOOS Glider DAC and three other national data centers, NOAA uncrewed surface vehicles from NOAA PMEL and NOAA OSMC, the National Data Buoy Center's moored buoys, NOAA CO-OPS tide gauges, the US academic research fleet — named by the Rolling Deck to Repository registry, positioned by the GTS, and tracked at full precision by SAMOS (Florida State University) where it carries them, with RV Falkor (too) relayed from the ship herself by the Schmidt Ocean Institute — radiosondes aloft from SondeHub (CC BY-SA 2.0), which is fed by volunteers with radio receivers rather than by the WMO and so sees about 40% of the world's launches, and the GTMBA tropical moored arrays — the last of which has nothing this far north, and is listed because the layer is one switch away. The National Hurricane Center's storm forecasts and wind speed probabilities are in the switcher for the same reason, along with the Japan Meteorological Agency's typhoons and the Joint Typhoon Warning Center's cyclones from the basins neither of the others covers. Everything but the seafloor is refetched hourly.

Five of the map's usual sources cannot appear on this page, and the projection is the reason: a raster tile is a picture of Web Mercator and cannot be redrawn on a polar plane. So the tiled basemaps — Esri Ocean, OpenStreetMap and GEBCO's own bathymetry rendering — are not offered here, and neither are the EMODnet Bathymetry shoreline, the Marine Regions (VLIZ) maritime boundaries, nor NOAA/NWS NEXRAD radar. The satellite cloud imagery, which comes from NASA GIBS / NOAA GOES, is absent for a different reason: a geostationary satellite sits over the equator and cannot see a pole, so GIBS publishes no GOES layer in either polar projection at all. GEBCO's depth contours are unaffected: they are geometry rather than pictures, so they reproject like the coastline does.