Machine-Learning Ocean Dynamics from Lagrangian Drifter Trajectories

Understand

Lagrangian ocean drifters provide highly accurate approximations of ocean surface currents but are sparsely located across the globe.

• As drifters passively follow ocean currents, there is minimal control on where they will be making measurements, providing limited temporal coverage for a given region.
• Complementary Eulerian velocity data is available with global coverage, but is itself limited by the spatial and temporal resolution possible with satellite altimetry measurements.
• Additionally, altimetry measurements approximate geostrophic components of ocean currents but neglect smaller sub-mesoscale motions and require smoothing and interpolation from raw satellite track measurements.