The code base in this release of the Marine Heatwave Tracker software provides all of the tools necessary to download, process, and visualise marine heatwaves (MHWs) globally. This web application may be set up to show the occurrence of MHWs around the world in near-real-time (roughly a one-two day delay) with the use of a cron job that runs a bash script calling 'MHW_daily.R'. The Tracker also show the historic records for the entire planet going back to January 1st, 1982. There are several other data layers offered in the Tracker. Please see the 'How do I use this?' section on the app for further details (http://www.marineheatwaves.org/tracker.html). A MHW is generally defined as when the temperature in a given location is in the top 10% of temperatures ever recorded during that time of year for at least 5 straight days. For example, if the coastal waters off Durban in South Africa are roughly 22°C on any given April 1st, if temperatures in excess of perhaps 28°C are recorded there in 2019 over March 28th to April 10th, this could be flagged as a MHW. This is a definition for MHWs first put forward by Hobday et al. 2016.

{"references": ["Hobday, A. J., Alexander, L. V., Perkins, S. E., Smale, D. A., Straub, S. C., Oliver, E. C., ... & Holbrook, N. J. (2016). A hierarchical approach to defining marine heatwaves. Progress in Oceanography, 141, 227-238."]}