Despite the widely recognized warming of the New England Continental Shelf (NES), climate patterns of the shelf’s economically and ecologically important coastal environments remain less examined. Here we use a satellite sea-surface temperature (SST) analysis gridded on 0.05°C spatial resolution to show, for the first time, the existence of a warm and a cold spot in the environs of Cape Cod, Massachusetts amid the NES warming of the past 15 years. The warm spot refers to an increasing warming trend in shallow waters of Nantucket Sound sheltered by the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. The summer SST maxima have increased by 3.1±1.0°C (p