Experiments
Experiment
The Hottest Place in the World
Every day, NASA's satellites measure the temperature of the ground itself. This map reads that data straight and shows what's actually hottest — right now, and ever.
The live layer pulls MODIS land-surface temperature from NASA LANCE at 1 km resolution, cross-checks each extreme reading against the satellite next door before trusting it, and excludes anything a wildfire could be causing. The all-time layer runs the same checks back across the full 24-year MODIS record — not a citation of someone else's number, but our own daily reading, accumulated.
Heat that isn't weather — a lava lake, a wildfire, a reading the other satellite couldn't confirm — gets its own section instead of either being hidden or quietly counted as climate.
What this is
This is land-surface temperature — how hot the ground gets in the sun — not the air temperature a weather station reports.satellite, not weather station
Air temperatures shown alongside a reading are estimates from a published model, not a second measurement.estimated, and labeled as such
Volcanoes and wildfires are real heat, but they are not the climate — they're ranked in their own section, never mixed into the weather record.not weather, said so
An extreme reading only enters the record once the satellite next door confirms it. One satellite alone isn't enough.cross-checked