14 DAY TRIAL // Before you pack your swimsuit and head to the sea this summer, you may want to check out the water's temperature with ESA's Medspiration heat map of all 2 965 500 square kilometres of the Mediterranean.
An updated map of the sea surface temperature (SST) of the world's largest inland sea is generated every day as part of ESA's Medspiration project, with an unprecedented spatial resolution of two square kilometres, high enough to detect detailed features like eddies, fronts and plumes within the surface temperature distribution.
In addition to ensuring you plunge into warm water, knowledge of SST is important for weather forecasting and is increasingly seen as a key indicator of climate change. The idea behind Medspiration is to combine data from multiple satellite systems to produce a robust set of sea surface data for assimilation into ocean forecasting models of the waters around Europe and also the whole of the Atlantic Ocean.
Like thermometers in the sky, a number of different satellites measure SST on an ongoing basis using state-of-the-art instruments. Medspiration utilizes data from ESA's Envisat and Meteosat-8, the United States' National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) polar orbiters, the Japanese's Space Agency-NASA Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission and the AMSRE instrument onboard NASA's Aqua.
The temperature of the surface of the ocean is an important physical property that strongly influences the transfer of heat and sensible and latent fluxes between the ocean and the atmosphere.
And because water takes a long time to warm up or cool down, the sea surface functions as an enormous reservoir of heat: the top two metres of ocean alone store all the equivalent energy contained in the atmosphere.
