Please note: 1. This report has not been peer-reviewed; 2. The conditions of use outlined in the report are superseded by the conditions specified by the License field in this metadata record; 3. The contact information included in the report is superseded by the contact information that can be found in the Responsible Parties field of this metadata record.This is the second in a new series of informal reports introduced in December 2006, intended to provide an overview of marine environmental conditions off South Africa. The reports are based on data from a variety of sources, including web sources, satellite sensors, the South African Weather Service, MCM's coastal and moored instruments and MCM's research cruises and inherent to all of these there is an inevitable lag between the time of data capture and the time when the data first become available for use. The lags are all different. For example, wind data from the Cape Point lighthouse is updated monthly, the moored temperature recorders are serviced every three months and the time series of satellite data are updated at irregular intervals resulting in lags which may be as long as a year. Therefore, while it is the aim that the environmental reports should reflect the conditions which prevailed over the months leading up to the reporting date, some of the data series may in fact be as much as a year out of date. This is obviously not a desirable situation and efforts are made to reduce the lags as far as possible. Unfortunately, the act of replacing a series with a long lag by a more current one often means loosing the advantage of a long time series and this is exactly what happened when, for this report, use of the PathFinder satellite image series was discontinued and the MODIS series adopted.