How we put each country’s climate on one page

What the page shows, where the numbers come from, how current they are, and what they can’t tell you.

The short answer

Each of our climate monitors follows one thing worldwide: El Niño, heatwaves, drought in farm regions, wildfires, coastal flooding, coral reefs. This page turns them around. You choose a country, and it shows what each monitor currently says about that country, then which large climate systems normally shape its weather, and how strongly.

How we know

Right now. Every night our monitors download their data from the original sources: NOAA for El Niño, daily temperatures, soil moisture and reef heat; the Global Wildfire Information System for burned area; the University of Hawaii Sea Level Center and NOAA for tide gauges. Straight after, we gather what each found for every country. Cities, crop regions and tide gauges are matched to countries by name; each of NOAA’s reef regions counts for one country: the one it is named after or lies in, otherwise the nearest coast. A few shared or disputed reef groups, such as the Spratly Islands, are left out.

Normally. For three large systems we keep a short list of the regions each one affects, how strongly and how. For El Niño and La Niña it follows NOAA’s maps of their typical effects in December–February and June–August. For the Atlantic overturning conveyor it follows the sources on our conveyor dashboard, including a 2024 comparison of four climate models on what a collapse would do to monsoon rains. For ocean heat it follows the IPCC: the ocean has taken up about 90% of the extra heat trapped by greenhouse gases. The levels “greatest” to “negligible” are our reading of those sources, not a measured score.

The ocean map. NASA’s Worldview draws a daily map of sea-surface temperature against the 2003–2014 average, from the international GHRSST analysis. We show the map from three days ago, so the day is complete.

How current each part is

El Niño / La Niña: NOAA’s monthly ocean and air-pressure indices.
Heat: daily highs to yesterday or the day before.
Drought in farm regions: the latest complete month.
Wildfires: burned area to the latest week, fire detections from the last 24 hours.
Coastal flooding: flood days per year at each tide gauge, to the latest complete year.
Coral reefs: heat stress to yesterday or the day before.

What the page can’t tell you

It is not a forecast or a warning. For both, follow your national weather service.

Our monitors cover selected places: 48 major cities, 26 crop regions, about 150 tide gauges and 214 reef areas. If a country has no card for heat or drought, we simply do not track a city or farm region there; it does not mean there is no heat or drought.

Country borders come from a simplified world map, so some small islands are missing from it; they appear under the name the tide-gauge network uses.

The list of climate systems is short on purpose: the three systems our dashboards follow. Other patterns, such as the North Atlantic Oscillation or the Indian Ocean Dipole, also shape regional weather and are not yet included.

Credits

Data from NOAA, the Global Wildfire Information System (European Commission Joint Research Centre and partners), the University of Hawaii Sea Level Center, NOAA Coral Reef Watch and NASA, as gathered by our climate monitors; borders from Natural Earth. We only download and present their public data.