We picture climate change as a warming sky.
But the ocean has quietly absorbed over 90% of that trapped heat.
And stored heat does not stay silent.
We picture climate change as a warming sky.
But the ocean has quietly absorbed over 90% of that trapped heat.
And stored heat does not stay silent.
The Atlantic has already warmed. What happens next depends on future emissions.
The Atlantic has not warmed evenly every year, but the long-term direction is clear.
If emissions fall sharply, Atlantic warming slows compared with higher-emissions futures.
If emissions continue at a middle path, the ocean keeps storing more heat across this century.
With high emissions, the Atlantic becomes a much warmer source of storm energy by 2100.
This does not mean every hurricane becomes stronger, but future storms can form over oceans with more available heat.
The ocean is soaking up that heat and a warmer Atlantic hands every hurricane that crosses it more fuel to burn.
The long-term trend is one thing; the map of warmth in any given season is another. Using NOAA GOES satellite observations, we can look at sea surface temperature across the tropical Atlantic — the region where most major hurricanes are born. Use the buttons below the map to compare hurricane season and non-hurricane season composites from the same satellite. Each map is a multi-day clear-sky median; hover any ocean cell to see whether that point came from GOES, interpolation, or ERSST gap-fill. Warmer water (toward the deep reds) is the fuel; the dashed band marks the main development region where storms most often spin up.
A destructive hurricane is rarely one ingredient — it’s several lining up at once. Explore a real Atlantic hurricane as NOAA GOES saw it: toggle between the storm itself, the warm sea surface beneath it, and the atmospheric moisture feeding it. Hover the scene to read the conditions at any point, and watch how the pieces stack together.
Warm water and moisture can help a hurricane grow.
But those ingredients are changing because the climate around them is changing.
The storm is local. The warming behind it is global.
So before we ask where the next storm goes, we have to follow the fuel.
If warm water fuels hurricanes, who has been filling the tank? Scroll to race through time.
Change the question, and the leaderboard changes.
A hurricane lasts for days.
The heat it draws from has been building for generations.
That is why hurricane risk is a climate story, not just a weather story.
The path we choose now shapes the ocean future storms will cross.
A hurricane lasts a few days. The ocean it feeds on has been warming for generations and warmer water means more moisture in the air, faster intensification, and heavier rain and storm surge when a storm finally reaches the coast.
Not every storm will be stronger. But each one now forms over an ocean we have quietly reshaped, charged by emissions that are global and that linger for centuries. The path we choose now decides how much more heat the ocean stores — and whether future generations inherit an Atlantic that stays closer to the low-emissions track, or keeps climbing toward the high one. Burn less, store less heat, and hurricanes form over water with less extra fuel waiting for them.
A hurricane is weather.
The warming ocean beneath it is climate.
Where would a hurricane thrive?
What makes a hurricane stronger or weaker? Drag the storm across the Atlantic and compare sea temperature, moisture, and wind conditions. The goal is not to predict a real storm, but to see how different storm ingredients can combine — or work against each other.
Tip: Tab to a circle, then press Enter to explore that location.
Drag anywhere on the map to explore ingredients.
The long-term chart shows annual-average Atlantic sea surface temperature (observed, then projected). The
satellite views come from NOAA GOES-16: the sea surface temperature map uses the
ABI-L2-SSTF product (quality-flagged, Kelvin converted to °C, median-composited across
10 sample days in Sep 2022 and Feb 2022 with six hourly snapshots per day, reprojected to
latitude/longitude and downsampled with a shared color scale). Small ocean gaps are filled by spatial
interpolation from nearby clear-sky GOES cells; persistent cloud gaps use NOAA ERSST v5
monthly means for the same month/year. Each grid cell records its source (GOES, interpolated, or ERSST);
hover the map to read it. The storm scene uses ABI-L2-MCMIPC visible, clean-infrared, and water-vapor bands for
Hurricane Ian on 28 Sep 2022. All GOES data was processed offline in a notebook
(process_goes.ipynb) into small JSON grids and WebP images, so this page loads quickly and does
not depend on raw satellite files or any live data service. Because the sea surface is obscured by cloud
beneath an active storm, the SST shown in the storm scene is a recent clear-sky composite that represents the
warm water in the storm’s path.
The “Make a hurricane” drag-map uses illustrative ingredient scores in
data/hurricane_zones.json (not sampled forecasts); optional SST cells reuse the
hurricane-season GOES grid above.
The “Follow the Fuel” leaderboard loads data/emissions_country_year.json,
built offline by scripts/process_emissions.py from the Our World in Data CO₂ dataset
(real countries only; cumulative and per-capita derived where needed). It shows three metrics on purpose:
annual emissions show current pressure, cumulative emissions show
historical contribution, and per-person emissions show intensity relative to population
— no single view is the whole story. Emissions are framed as contribution to the warming system, not
as a direct cause of any individual storm.