Systematic changes in observational and instrumental methods are major factors that may introduce false climate trends into the surface marine climate record, e.g., the largely undocumented mixture of shipboard measurements of sea surface temperature (SST) taken by bucket versus engine room intake. Compounding the heterogeneities within ship data, during the past few decades there have been a significant increases in the numbers of automated measurements from drifting and moored buoys, as well as oceanographic profile data from instruments such as expendable bathythermographs (XBT). This preliminary study attempts to identify near-global patterns of SST differences between three selected platform types: ships, drifting buoys, and temperatures extracted from the uppermost levels of XBT profiles.