El Niño Live Map: Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies
This is El Niño as a satellite sees it: every patch of ocean colored by how far its surface temperature sits above or below normal, updated daily from NASA GHRSST measurements. The event itself is the ribbon of orange and red along the equator — currently running about +1.8°C in the Niño 3.4 region (week of July 1, 2026). Pan, zoom and step back through the last 30 days below.
How to read this map
The colors show anomalies, not temperatures: how much warmer or cooler the sea surface is than its long-term average for this date. Grays sit near normal. Yellows, oranges and reds mark water running warm — the deepest reds are 2–3°C above average, which for the open ocean is an enormous amount of extra heat. Greens, blues and purples mark unusually cool water. The palette is NASA's own, and the legend under the map translates it degree by degree.
Anomalies are the right lens for El Niño because the tropical Pacific is always warm in absolute terms — what matters is the pattern of change. A weather map would show you that the western Pacific is warmer than the water off Peru on almost any day of any year. The anomaly map strips that permanent background away and reveals the event: where heat has moved to that it doesn't normally occupy.
The warm tongue
During El Niño, the signature feature is a tongue of warm anomalies stretching westward from the South American coast along the equator — thousands of kilometers long and impossible to miss right now. In a normal year this strip of ocean is kept cool by trade winds dragging surface water westward and by cold, deep water upwelling along the coast of Peru and Ecuador. When the trade winds falter, warm water piled up in the west sloshes back east and the upwelling shuts down; the tongue on this map is that process made visible. The stronger and more continuous the tongue, the stronger the event — compare its reach week to week as the 2026–27 El Niño builds toward its expected winter peak, and read the full story on the 2026–27 event page.
Where Niño 3.4 sits
The headline number on our dashboard comes from one specific box on this map: the Niño 3.4 region, spanning 5°N–5°S and 170°W–120°W. Find it by starting at the Americas and following the equator west: past the Galápagos, roughly the middle third of the ocean between South America and the dateline. When forecasters say the event measures +1.8°C, they mean the average anomaly inside that box — chosen decades ago because its temperature couples most tightly to the atmosphere, which is what turns warm water into worldwide weather.
Two neighboring features are worth watching too. Hugging the South American coast is the Niño 1+2 region, the historical birthplace of the name — it often runs the hottest anomalies of all during strong events, and it is the number Peruvian flood forecasters watch most closely. And far to the west, around the dateline, the leading edge of the warm pool tells you whether the event is still feeding: fresh pulses of warmth arriving from the west — surfacing Kelvin waves — show up as blobs that drift eastward over a few weeks before merging into the tongue.
What changes day to day
Ocean temperature moves slowly, so don't expect drama between yesterday and today — the value of a daily map is the month-scale story. Use the date selector above the map to step back through the last 30 days and the tongue's growth becomes obvious. Speckle and small swirls are normal (eddies, cloud gaps in the satellite record); trust the broad shapes, not single pixels. For the measured, quality-controlled numbers behind the imagery, see our data & methodology page — and for what all this warm water means for your region, start with the impact guides.