Direct measurements of the sea surface temperature (SST) from multiple platforms deployed during the Atlantic Tradewind Ocean-Atmosphere Mesoscale Interaction Campaign (ATOMIC) field campaign are used to evaluate the ability of satellite SST products to accurately represent spatial gradients within the region. The results further provide insight into the suitability of different satellite SST products for application to ATOMIC and other northwest tropical Atlantic scientific analyses. In situ SST measurements from the Research Vessel Ronald H. Brown, Saildrones, and Surface Velocity Program – Salinity (SVPS) drifters were collocated with five daily Level 4 satellite SST analyses and two Level 3 single-sensor satellite SST products during the period from January 1 to February 24, 2020. The absolute accuracy of the satellite products was generally good with random errors on the order of 0.2 K or less, though most exhibited a small cool bias of ∼0.1 K. The biases were not representative of a consistent offset, but rather larger cool biases of a subset of observations influenced the overall statistics. Sub-grid SST variability in the ATOMIC region was small (< 0.03 K) in relationship both to other regions and to uncertainties in the satellite products. Despite their absolute accuracy, the L4 analyses accurately reproduced the spatial SST variability within the ATOMIC domain only on scales of 0.5–1° or more. At the scale of their respective grid resolutions, correlations between satellite-derived and Saildrone-inferred grid-scale SST gradients were low, as the satellite–Saildrone SST differences dominated over small cell-to-cell variability in the region. One reason was the coarser feature resolution of the analyses compared to their grid resolution. Correlations increased with the distance over which the SST values were averaged. Simulations demonstrated that a satellite product precision near 0.05 K was needed to successfully reproduce the observed SST spatial variability at the grid cell level. Comparison with Saildrone observations from the Arctic showed sub-grid SST variability six-times larger and a relaxed satellite accuracy requirement of near 0.5 K in that region, but the satellite product accuracy was also degraded, again hindering the accurate sampling of SST gradients at the scale of the L4 analyses.