Climate change threatens even the best-protected and most-remote coral reef ecosystems. Management must now incorporate how various factors (e.g., benthic structure, currents and local upwelling, connectivity, herbivore abundance, thermal history) affect coral and reef resilience. More than a decade of research indicates that thermal history is among the most important factors influencing this resilience.

With support from the NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program, Coral Reef Watch (CRW) developed a variety of Thermal History metrics for coral reef management, initially released in July 2014. In the current Version 3.5 (v3.5, released January 2024), several Sea Surface Temperature (SST) metrics are calculated for reef-containing locations and adjacent waters and are arranged into six themes: Stress Frequency, Stress Onset, SST Variability, SST Trend, Climatology, and Annual History.

The v3.5 metrics were derived from CRW's v3.1 daily global 5km (1/20°) CoralTemp satellite SST data product, for the period 1985-2023. Source data for CoralTemp are the NOAA/National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) operational near real-time Daily Global 5km Geostationary-Polar-orbiting (Geo-Polar) Blended Night-only SST Analysis, from October 2016 to present; the NOAA/NESDIS Daily Global 5km Geo-Polar Blended Night-only SST Reanalysis (a reprocessed dataset), from November 2002 to October 2016; and the Daily Global 5km Night-only SST Reanalysis produced by the United Kingdom Met Office, on the Operational SST and Sea Ice Analysis (OSTIA) system, from January 1985 to November 2002.