Global hourly location and velocities from GDP surface drifters tracked by Argos or GPS,as described in Elipot et al. (2016), "A global surface drifter dataset at hourly resolution", J. Geophys. Res. Oceans,121 doi:10.1002/2016JC011716. These data are a subset of the historical 6h data when hourly resolution became possible.

Version 1.04, released October 2020
Generated by Rick Lumpkin (NOAA/AOML), Shane Elipot (Univ. Miami), and Bertrand Dano (NOAA/AOML and CIMAS/Univ. Miami)

The data in Matlab format are located via direct links at 
	https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/gdp/hourly_data.php
and are also placed in Matlab and NetCDF format at 
	ftp://ftp.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/pub/lumpkin/hourly
As of v1.04, these files are grouped into 8 blocks of Argos drifters and 1 block with GPS drifters.  The NetCDF files follow the NCEI NetCDF Trajectory Template v2 contain a significant amount of additional metadata, and are one file per drifter, arranged in subdirectories following the block name conventions.  These subdirectories containing blocks of NetCDF files are also available as gzipped tar files. Please refer to the metadata within the NetCDF files to explain the variables contained in them. The Matlab files contain the following variables:
  DROGUE: 1=drogue attached, 0=drogue lost, 0.5=status unknown
  GAP: time interval (hours) between previous and next location fix 
  ID: unique Global Drifter Program identification number
  LAT: latitude (degrees N)
  LAT_ERR: error in latitude (degrees) forming 95% confidence intervals
  LON: longitude (degrees E)
  LON_ERR: error in longitude (degrees) forming 95% confidence intervals
  RMSGAP (Argos files only): root mean square temporal distance (hours)between the hourly interpolating time and the four Argos fixes used for the estimation (three Argos fixes for beginning and end of trajectory)
  TIME: hours since 01 January 1979, 0000UTC
  U: zonal velocity (meters per second)
  U_ERR: zonal velocity error (meters per second) forming 95% confidence intervals
  V: meridional velocity (meters per second)
  V_ERR: meridional velocity error (meters per second) forming 95% confidence intervals

For many possible additional format choices, and also the ability to compile all the hourly data for one spatial area or time period into a single file, the data can be accessed at
http://osmc.noaa.gov/erddap/tabledap/gdp_hourly_velocities.html
(courtesy of Kevin O'Brien, NOAA/PMEL).