Marine Heatwaves and Cold Spells: Daily Flags and Duration from Satellite Data

A portal from the Government Digital Service contains daily marine heatwave and cold spell datasets from 2020 to the present. The data includes flags for events based on sea surface temperature percentiles and durations calculated over a 10-day rolling window. It is derived from the OSTIA L4 Reprocessed satellite data product.

Use Cases

• Detecting marine heatwave events based on daily sea surface temperature exceeding the 90th percentile.
• Tracking the duration of marine cold spells based on consecutive days below the 10th percentile.
• Identifying areas at risk of developing into full events using the 1-5 day warning flags.
• Analyzing spatial and temporal patterns of ocean temperature extremes from satellite-derived data.

Strengths

• Provides multiple related datasets (flags, durations, warnings) for a cohesive analysis of temperature extremes.
• Data is derived from the OSTIA L4 Reprocessed product, which is a known satellite-based sea surface temperature dataset.
• Covers the period from 2020 to the present, offering recent observations.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and file size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

Government Digital Service via the Cefas Data Cube Viewer.

Collection Method

Calculated from the OSTIA L4 Reprocessed satellite sea surface temperature data.

Time Range

2020-present

Freshness

Updated daily from 2020 to present, but specific last update is unknown.

Geography

Global, based on the coverage of the OSTIA product.