NASA's theme this past Earth Day was The Ocean Touches Everything, and this is no exaggeration. The global ocean covers more than 70% of Earth’s surface and contains 97% of the planet's water. The ocean is a vast and critical reservoir that supports a diversity of life, helps regulate climate, provides a large amount of the planet’s oxygen, and stores an abundance of carbon dioxide. NASA satellite, airborne, and in-situ missions and projects are constantly collecting data about the global ocean.
The Gulf Stream off the East Coast of the U.S. is a vital ocean component. This map view shows the Gulf Stream on May 29, 2024, as a ribbon of dark red hugging the coast. This warm, swift current starts in the Gulf of Mexico, flows through the straits of Florida and toward North Carolina, then turns eastward as it moves toward northwestern Europe to become the North Atlantic Current.
The base true-color corrected reflectance image was acquired by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) aboard the joint NASA/NOAA NOAA-20 satellite. Overlaid on the base image is Sea Surface Temperature from the Group for High Resolution Sea Surface Temperature (GHRSST). The Multiscale Ultrahigh Resolution (MUR) L4 analysis is based upon nighttime GHRSST L2P skin and subskin SST observations from several instruments, including the NASA Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-EOS (AMSR-E), the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASA's Aqua and Terra platforms, the U.S. Navy microwave WindSat radiometer, and in-situ SST observations from the NOAA iQuam project.
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Dataset
MUR-JPL-L4-GLOB-v4.1 doi:10.5067/GHGMR-4FJ04