· · · · · · · · · · — composed on one globe, from public data only
earth composes the world's open climate data on one globe: eighteen satellite layers, the ocean's interior from Argo floats and the GLORYS reanalysis, glaciers, biodiversity, facility-level emissions — plus dashboards for global temperature, Earth's energy imbalance, the AMOC and sea level, and a searchable catalog of 249 open datasets. Public data only; no keys, no accounts, no server.
In a hurry? The words in the tagline above are one-click scenes — "sea ice" puts the daily sea-ice field on the globe, "floats" the live Argo fleet, and so on. Each shows exactly one layer (and replaces whatever was on); the chips that appear on the globe undo it.
This Layers view is the globe's control room:
The other tabs: Temp — warming since 1880 · Energy — the planet's energy imbalance · AMOC — the overturning circulation this app is ultimately about · Sea level — the rise and its causes · Tides — the global tide animated live, with the moon · Catalog — all 249 datasets · About — background & further reading.
Daily NASA GIBS imagery. Aggregate averages any continuous layer per pixel over the past N days ending on the chosen date (1–730). Missing pixels (clouds, night) are excluded — each pixel divides by the days it was actually observed, so cloudy-day gaps fill in; for precipitation, dry pixels count as zero, so the result is a true mean rate. Independent of the comparison mode.
Which date it compares against. An offset (“vs 10 years ago”) is relative: move the Date and the comparison moves with it, keeping the same month on both sides — which is what makes a satellite comparison mean anything, since most of a raw month-to-month difference is the seasonal cycle. A specific date pins it instead, for reading everything against one reference. Typing in the comparison date field, or stepping it, pins it automatically; choosing an offset again hands it back to tracking.
Side-by-side: drag the divider (left = past, right = current). Computed change: per-pixel "now − then" for continuous layers (SST & anomalies, sea ice, snow, land temperature, salinity), and a ×-fold ratio of window means for log-distributed ones (precipitation, chlorophyll, aerosol).
While a window is active, layers that can't be averaged (true colour, 30-min precipitation) are hidden rather than shown as a misleading single day — a note appears below when that happens. Averaged views cap zoom to stay responsive and sample up to 12 days from the window.
Composes everything the app can know about a clicked point: live weather and a 7-day forecast, all nine satellite fields at the chosen date, climate normals with the SST anomaly, and nearby observing/emitting context. When this is off, a click reads the value of the layer you're looking at instead — unless no layer is active, in which case the full card is the only sensible answer.
Three independent estimates of the same sea-surface temperature field, combined in the browser. The mean is a best guess; the spread shows where the analyses disagree — i.e. where the ocean is poorly observed and any single product is least trustworthy.
The world's largest individual sources of greenhouse gas — power plants, steelworks, oil & gas fields, shipping lanes — estimated facility-by-facility from satellites and public data by the Climate TRACE coalition. Dot size scales with annual CO₂-equivalent emissions; click a dot for details.
A fleet of ~3,800 robotic floats drifting through every ocean, each diving to 2,000 m every ten days and measuring temperature and salinity on the way up. Argo is how we know the ocean absorbs over 90% of global-warming heat; click a float for its live dashboard.
The fixed sentinels of the climate system: the mooring arrays that measure the Atlantic overturning circulation (RAPID, OSNAP, MOVE, SAMBA — feeding the AMOC tab) and the observatories behind the iconic CO₂ records (Mauna Loa's Keeling curve, Jungfraujoch). Each marker links to its own data.
Every glacier on Earth (274,531) from the Randolph Glacier Inventory, joined with each glacier's measured 2000–2020 thinning rate (Hugonnet et al. 2021, from differenced satellite elevation models). Switch to melt-rate colouring to see 78% of glaciers thinning — and the anomalous stable Karakoram.
Red water stands above mean sea level, blue below (legend on the globe; tap the ocean for the exact cm) — the two tidal bulges sweeping the ocean, rotating around amphidromic points, spring and neap breathing over a fortnight. While this layer runs, the sun lights the globe on the sim clock, so daylight, ☀ and the solar tide agree. Five harmonic constituents (M2 S2 N2 K1 O1) per 1° cell, ~90% of the tidal signal.
Nearly four billion dated, located records of where life has been observed — museum specimens to citizen-science photos — from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Filter by kingdom, major group (birds, insects, mammals…), or a climate-indicator species; warming shifts many ranges poleward and uphill at a median of ~17 km per decade. Humans are in there too, but privacy-restricted to a tiny count.
Annual global surface-temperature anomaly vs the 1951–1980 mean. The land-only curve runs well above land+ocean — land warms faster than the sea because water stores and mixes heat. NASA GISS GISTEMP v4. Hover for values.
Land has warmed roughly twice as fast as the ocean surface. That contrast drives shifting climate zones, heatwaves, and the poleward species shifts in the Biodiversity layer — and it is why a "global" number understates what continents actually experience. For land temperature in space, turn on the Land surface temperature (MODIS) layer on the globe.
Source: NASA GISS GISTEMP v4.
The planet-scale cause of this warming — the energy imbalance driving it — has its own Energy tab.
The planet is running an energy surplus: averaged over the last decade of the ocean record charted below, Earth took in about – W/m² more energy than it returned to space — a measured number, and the direct physical cause of global warming. Everything else in this app (rising temperature, melting ice, rising seas) is this surplus, distributed. It is small in relative terms — ~0.3 % of the ~340 W/m² flowing through the system — which is why it can only be seen in careful global accounting, never on a map.
The numbers on this panel fit together like this: the big tile, – W/m², is what this record directly measures — heat accumulating in the ocean's 0–2000 m layer, as a 10-year average. Dividing by 0.9 adds the ~10 % that melts ice and warms land, air and the deeper ocean, giving the total above. And the often-quoted "about 1 W/m²" is where the most recent years of the second chart stand — the imbalance varies year to year and has roughly tripled over the record, so any single figure needs its date attached. NASA's CERES radiometers, measuring the same quantity completely independently from orbit, agree on both the size and the rise (their 2023 annual value touched ~1.8 W/m²).
And the much larger numbers in IPCC reports? Assessments quote ~2.8 W/m² of radiative forcing from greenhouse gases (IPCC AR5, 1750→2011; AR6 puts the total net human forcing at ~2.7 W/m² by 2019, once the ~−1 W/m² of aerosol cooling is netted in). Forcing and imbalance are different quantities: forcing is how hard we push the climate away from balance, while the imbalance on this panel is the part of that push not yet answered. Because the planet has already warmed ~1.2 °C, it radiates roughly 2 W/m² more back to space than in 1750 — cancelling most of the forcing. The remainder — the ~0.8 W/m² measured here — is what still flows into the ocean. If forcing stopped growing, that remainder would decay toward zero as warming catches up; instead the second chart shows it rising: the push is growing faster than the planet can answer it.
Y axis: accumulated heat, in 10²² joules (= 10 ZJ), relative to a mid-record baseline — not a rate. About 90 % of the planet's excess energy ends up in the ocean, so this curve is the imbalance's bank statement: its slope is the imbalance itself. A steady imbalance would be a straight line; the visible steepening means the imbalance has been growing. Always shown raw — a running total needs no smoothing; the Smooth control below applies to its slope. The depth layers nest: 0–700 m is contained in 0–2000 m, so their difference — the 700–2000 m slab — shows heat arriving in the deep layer, a growing share of the total: warming is reaching ever deeper. Below 2000 m no yearly series exists (ships survey the abyss roughly once a decade); those repeat surveys add another ~5–10 % (≈0.06 W/m², Purkey & Johnson), which is part of why the total imbalance exceeds the 0–2000 m number. Hover for yearly values.
Y axis: watts per m² of the whole Earth's surface — the slope of the curve above, computed over the Smooth window (at 1y it is simply each year's heat gain; wider windows show the underlying trend), so yes: the imbalance varies over time. The wiggles are real climate variability, and the shading names it: amber bands are moderate-or-stronger El Niño winters (the ocean sheds heat to the atmosphere — the rate dips), teal bands La Niña (the ocean banks extra heat), deeper tint = stronger event — hues deliberately unlike either data line, which plot heat content, not ENSO. Only moderate+ events (|ONI| ≥ 1.0, ~30 % of winters) are shaded: at the official "weak" threshold of ±0.5 °C, seventy percent of winters qualify — ENSO's neutral state is genuinely the minority — and the chart read as if every year were an event. Weak years still show on hover. The ▲ triangles mark eruptions that loaded the stratosphere with sulfur, dimming sunlight for ~2 years — watch the rate sag after Pinatubo 1991 (Hunga Tonga 2022 is the oddball: mostly water vapour, a slight warming agent). Famous ash crises like Eyjafjallajökull 2010 don't appear because they don't belong: grounding flights takes ash in the troposphere; changing Earth's energy budget takes megatons of stratospheric sulfur, which that eruption never delivered. The climb from ~0.2–0.4 W/m² in the late 20th century toward ~1 W/m² now is the acceleration. Divide by ~0.9 for the total imbalance (the other ~10 % melts ice and warms land and air). CERES satellite radiometry, measured completely independently at the top of the atmosphere, shows the same magnitude and the same rise — one of the strongest closure tests in climate science (Loeb et al. 2021).
The two thin curves put the measured lines in context — they are the push, not the stored heat: the dashed line is total human forcing (greenhouse gases minus the aerosol offset, AR6/Forster et al. annual series), climbing from ~0.3 W/m² in 1955 to ~3 W/m² now, and the green line is everything nature adds — solar variability plus volcanoes. Note how small the green line is: it hugs zero (±0.2 W/m², the ~11-year solar cycle) except when a big eruption drives it briefly to −1…−2 W/m² — dips that land exactly on the ▲ markers. The gap between the dashed push and the measured imbalance below it is not natural cooling — nature has nothing that size on offer. It is the planet's own answer: the ~1.2 °C of realized warming radiates roughly 2 W/m² more to space, paying off most of the push; the measured lines are the part still unpaid.
The dashed curve would not drop to zero — it is attached to the stock of greenhouse gases already in the air, not to ongoing activity. If emissions stopped dead: the aerosol sunshade (~−1 W/m² of the offset inside the dashed line) washes out within weeks, so the first effect is a few tenths of a degree of extra warming; methane (~12-year lifetime) decays within decades; CO₂ draws down only over centuries to millennia. Model experiments (ZECMIP, assessed in AR6) find temperature then roughly plateaus for a century or more: the slow CO₂ decline and the ocean's slow release of banked heat nearly cancel. The imbalance charted here would taper toward zero — but the thermometer would not come back down on any human timescale. Stopping the cause freezes the effect in place; it does not rewind it.
Remove the dashed curve entirely and the green line is the whole story: a world pushed only by the ~11-year solar cycle and the occasional volcanic dip. In that world the late 20th century looks like the green line — flat to gently cooling. Reconstructions and attribution studies agree: natural forcing alone since 1850 gives roughly 0 to −0.1 °C — slight cooling, from the slow orbital drift toward the next glacial inception (tens of thousands of years away) plus episodic volcanism. Essentially all of the modern warming, and everything the ledger above records, sits in the gap between the green and dashed curves. The tempting arithmetic "human push is ~1.8–2.8 W/m², the imbalance is only ~0.8, so ~1–2 W/m² must be natural cooling" fails because the missing term isn't nature — it's the warming itself, already radiating the difference back to space.
1 W/m² planet-wide ≈ 16 ZJ per year — roughly 250 times humanity's annual energy consumption, absorbed as heat, every year. The famous comparison is arithmetically exact: today's imbalance equals detonating about – Hiroshima-sized bombs' worth of energy every second, around the clock (15 kt TNT ≈ 6.3×10¹³ J; James Hansen's 2012 figure was ~4/s — the number has grown with the imbalance). The image is worth keeping honest: nothing explodes — the same joules arrive as diffuse warmth spread through billions of tonnes of seawater, which is precisely why something this enormous stays invisible without careful accounting. The +224 ZJ the upper ocean has banked since 2005 resurfaces elsewhere in this app: as the steric (thermal-expansion) share of the Sea level tab's budget, as the "upper 700 m stored heat" line when you click the ocean with the pixel inspector, and as the subsurface marine heatwaves in the 300 m anomaly layer. The Energy balance (CERES) globe layer shows the ±100 W/m² geography whose near-cancellation hides this number: the tropics bank energy, the poles shed it, and the currents and winds between them are the delivery system.
Source: NOAA NCEI Global Ocean Heat Content (Levitus et al.); forcing curves from the Indicators of Global Climate Change ERF series (Forster et al., AR6 method, annual to 2024); framing per Loeb et al. 2021 & von Schuckmann et al.
Atlantic overturning transport at 26.5°N, 10-day means, Apr 2004 – Mar 2024. 1 Sv = 10⁶ m³/s. Hover the chart for values.
Data: RAPID-MOCHA-WBTS
(NOC / U. Miami / NOAA). Refresh with scripts/refresh_data.py.
The AMOC carries ~17 Sv of warm water north at this latitude on average. Statistical early-warning studies (Ditlevsen & Ditlevsen 2023) and model experiments (van Westen et al. 2024) suggest weakening toward a possible tipping point — this dashboard tracks the primary observational record. Roadmap: OSNAP & Florida Current series, SST-fingerprint indices, variance / autocorrelation early-warning statistics.
Observed global mean sea level (white) and its causes as separate lines; the grey dashed line is the summed budget — it tracking the observed line is budget closure. Blue dots are satellite altimetry. 1900–2018 budget from Frederikse et al. 2020; altimetry from NOAA. Hover for the year-by-year breakdown.
Sea-level rise is a physical accounting identity: the observed rise must equal thermal expansion of warming water plus the mass added by melting glaciers, Greenland, Antarctica, and changes in land water storage. That these independent measurements sum to the observed total ("closure") is one of the strongest cross-checks in climate science — and it decomposes why the ocean is rising: roughly a third thermal expansion, the rest added ice mass. A small residual between the observed line and the summed stack reflects remaining measurement uncertainty.
Sources: Frederikse et al. 2020, NOAA STAR altimetry.
The picture is on the globe — opening this tab switches the Tide height (live) layer on (also in the Layers list); this tab is its control room. ☾ marks the sub-lunar point (the moon directly overhead), ☀ the sub-solar point.
The curve runs from six hours ago to three days ahead, so the blue now line sits on the water and you can see whether the tide is rising or falling; dashed lines are local midnights, dots are high and low water (dimmed ones have already happened). The vertical axis scales to this point — the globe's colour scale is fixed for every point, so a shelf sea and mid-ocean look very different here and identical there. Tap another ocean point, or search a place, to move this readout.
This is the actual shape of the global tide, reconstructed each frame from the five main harmonic constituents of the EOT20 ocean tide model — the moon's twice-daily tide (M2), the sun's (S2), the moon's elliptic-orbit correction (N2), and the two daily constituents (K1, O1). Red water stands above mean sea level, blue below.
Two things the equilibrium cartoon never shows: the bulges cannot keep up with the moon — continents are in the way — so the tide instead rotates around fixed hubs (amphidromic points, the still spots the red/blue pattern pivots on); and the range varies enormously, from centimetres mid-ocean to metres on wide shelves (switch the Tidal range layer on, in the Layers tab, to see where). When ☾ and ☀ pull together (new/full moon) M2 and S2 align: spring tides. At quarter moons they oppose: neap. Watch the pattern breathe over a fortnight at 1 day/s.
Fine print: harmonic constants fit to 1992–2019 satellite altimetry (EOT20, Hart-Davis et al. 2021, CC-BY); 1° grid, five constituents (~90% of the signal in most of the ocean; shallow-water overtides and the 18.6-year nodal modulation, ±10–15% on lunar amplitudes, are omitted). The clock starts at real time and the moon marker is a low-precision ephemeris (~1°) — this tab runs on its own clock, not the date selector.
The picture is on the globe — this tab animates the date, so whatever you have on the globe right now is what plays. Set the view up in the Layers tab, come back here, choose a span and press play: the date walks from start to end and every dated layer follows it, exactly as if you were holding down the +1d button.
Which means the comparison and the aggregate come along for free. Play with a side-by-side comparison on and you get a wipe of a moving present against a pinned past; play in computed difference and you animate the anomaly rather than the field; play with a 30-day window and you get a running mean instead of daily weather noise. Nothing here overrides those — it just moves the date underneath them.
Nothing on the globe follows the date yet, so there is nothing to play. Switch a dated layer on in the Layers tab first — surface temperature or sea ice are good ones to watch — and its frames will show up here.
Choose a start and an end date — or one of the presets — and press ▶. What the step resolved to, and how fast the frames are really arriving, is reported here while it plays.
The step follows the data, not the calendar. On auto it takes the finest cadence among the layers you have on — a day for daily products, five days for the 5-day sea-surface-height epochs, a month for the monthly ones, a year for the annual ones. A monthly product has nothing new to show on the 2nd of the month, so stepping it a day at a time would mean thirty identical pictures and thirty identical requests to NASA. Frames that would look the same are dropped; you can still force a step by hand.
The requested speed is a speed limit, not a promise. Frames are satellite tiles arriving over the network from NASA, and the player waits for the picture to be on screen before advancing — so asking for 8 frames/s on a slow link gets you whatever the link gives. The status line above says which of the two is binding, because a player that claimed 8 while showing 1.4 would be lying about the thing you are looking at.
A long range coarsens the step; it never shortens the range. Thirty years at one day is twelve thousand frames, which is neither watchable nor polite to a public NASA service. Past a few hundred frames the step widens a notch — day to 5 days, 5 days to a month — and the panel says so. The span you asked for is always the span you get; only its resolution gives way.
Not offered, deliberately: saving the animation as a GIF or a video. What you are watching is the live globe, with everything that implies — you can still spin it, click a pixel and read its value mid-play.
earth is a prototype for exploring the world's open climate data on a 3D globe — and, eventually, for generating predictions from it (e.g., will the AMOC collapse, and when?). Everything runs from public data with zero API keys and no server of its own.
On the globe: eighteen NASA GIBS satellite layers (temperature, ice, rain, vegetation, forest loss, water storage, energy balance …), the ocean interior from Argo floats and the GLORYS reanalysis (currents, mixed-layer depth, subsurface heat), the Randolph glacier inventory with melt rates, GBIF biodiversity, Climate TRACE emitters, and the AMOC monitoring network. Behind it: a machine-readable catalog of 249 open climate datasets and dashboards for temperature, the planet's energy imbalance, the AMOC and sea level. The full guide lives at the top of the Layers tab.
Analysis notes: combining datasets · the per-pixel state vector · species & climate
Data catalog (readable) · catalog.json · source on GitHub
ML status & training curves — live runs of the Earth-State Embeddings codecs, their AMOC probes, and the paper.
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