it is a tool that shows daily snap shots of the SST to use it you need to have a good grasp on geography/oceanography, and then spen a bit of time each day looking at it, and cross corelating with things like hurricanes, to see the trace spiral of cooler water that a giant storm will imprint into the oceans surface, or this year, the very significant chanhes in the worlds major hot and cold currents, and size of the spill over from the south wester pacific into the atlantic.