This dataset includes hourly sea surface temperature and current data collected by satellite-tracked surface drifting buoys ("drifters") of the NOAA Global Drifter Program. The Drifter Data Assembly Center (DAC) at NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) has applied quality control procedures and processing to edit these observational data and obtain estimates at regular hourly intervals. The data include positions (latitude and longitude), sea surface temperatures (total, diurnal, and non-diurnal components) and velocities (eastward, northward) with accompanying uncertainty estimates. Metadata include identification numbers, experiment number, start location and time, end location and time, drogue loss date, death code, manufacturer, and drifter type.
Two papers describe how these dataset were derived:
Elipot et al. 2016 (for position and velocity) and
Elipot et al. 2022 (for sea surface temperature).
Please see below the release notes and how to access and cite this dataset.
Figure caption: Adapted from Elipot et al. (2022): Top panel: Spatial distribution of total SST estimates of dataset version 2.00 expressed as a density per (50 km)2 in half- degree spatial bins. Bottom panel: temporal distributions of position and velocity, total SST (sm), and diurnal SST (sD) estimates in 10-day bins from 03-Oct-1987 13:00:00 to 30-Jun-2020 23:00:00.
Data Access
The hourly dataset version 2.00 is officially available from NOAA NCEI at https://doi.org/10.25921/x46c-3620. After accessing this page, click on the “Lineage” tab and on the link for “Output Datasets”, then “data”, then “0-data”, and finally on “gdp_v2.00.nc” to download through your web browser. Alternatively, click on this link to download the NetCDF file directly (size is about 12GB).
The dataset is distributed as a single NetCDF file containing contiguous ragged arrays, one for each data variable, as well as all metadata.
In order to get you started with this hourly dataset, you can head over to this Jupyter Notebook on GitHub that shows you a couple of simple examples on how to use these data.
Alternative ways of accessing this dataset or the previous versions are given below.
Citations
When using this dataset in your studies or publications, please use the following citation:
Elipot, Shane; Sykulski, Adam; Lumpkin, Rick; Centurioni, Luca; Pazos, Mayra (2022). Hourly location, current velocity, and temperature collected from Global Drifter Program drifters world-wide.[indicate subset used]. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.25921/x46c-3620. Accessed [date].
Additionally, we would be very grateful if you could cite the papers describing how the dataset were derived. If you use the dataset of position and velocity, please cite:
And if you use the dataset of sea surface temperature, please cite:
Release notes for version 2.00, September 2022:
Release notes for version 1.04:
Alternative ways of accessing dataset versions 2.00 and earlier:
The version 2.00 of the dataset can also be obtained as 17,324 individual NetCDF files, one per drifter, from the FTP server of the DAC using the following address in a FTP client ftp://ftp.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/pub/lumpkin/hourly/v2.00/ or use ftp over https at this link
Finally, to obtain a subset of the data based on various criteria (temporal, spatial, etc), you may go to the OSMC ERDDAP server and reference these instructions.
The previous versions (releases) of the dataset (from v1.00 to v1.04) are also available in various formats (Matlab and NetCDF) at ftp://ftp.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/pub/buoydata/hourly_product/.