Full description: The surface drifters are GPS-tracked floating buoys with one hour resolution records that record the velocity and temperature of surface ocean currents.The main objective of this Lagrangian measurement program is to characterize surface particle dispersion in the deep waters of the Perdido region, with the intention of understanding the physical processes involved in the transport and mixing of passive tracers, in order to provide a dataset to assess the accuracy of numerical model predictions and improve the parameterizations of submesoscale features in simulated particle trajectories obtained from ocean models in the deep water regions of the Gulf of Mexico.
Four experiments were performed in two years (2016-2017) and two seasons for both years (spring and fall), using three different type of drifters: Microstar (MIC), CODE (COD) and DORIS (DOR). These were launched in triplets in a triangular shape of ~100m sides, each triplet separated by ~50km from each other along three cross-shore transects over the continental slope.
The data are delivered in NetCDF format in a "Contiguous ragged array representation of time series", under NetCDF Climate and Forecast (CF) Metadata Conventions, and using Attribute Convention for Data Discovery version 1.3 and the CF Standard Name Table version 1.6.
The data include: experiment ID, drifter type (model), drifter ID, triplet ID, drifter name, number of observations for each trajectory, time, latitude, longitude, zonal and meridional velocity, current speed and direction, sea water temperature (°C), strain value for those drifters that include drogue (only MICROSTAR), and 6 quality control flags. Note that some drifter IDs are repeated (3, 29, 14, 25, 26, 36, 72 and 78). That was because these drifters were recovered and deployed again in following experiments. As part of the quality control process, all drifter trajectory data has been examined to identify instances where drifter had a bad GPS position (flag 1, 2 and 4), record gaps longer than 6 hours (flag 3), submerged value under the limit that indicate loss of drogue (flag 5) and bad sea water temperature data (flag 6).

Acknowledgment: The DWDE database is a product with author registration in Mexico. It can be licensed for non-commerical use, and it is prohibited to share it with third parties, as well as to profit or sell products derived from it. Under these criteria, the only additional condition is that the product resulting from the use of this data includes the acknowledgments: "The acquisition of the surface drifter data from the DWDE experiment has been financed by the CONACYT-SENER-Hydrocarbons Sector Fund, Mexico (project 201441), developed by the Gulf of Mexico Research Consortium (CIGoM). We recognize PEMEX for promoting to the Fund the specific demand on oil spills and the environment. Database description and download request found here http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3979964."

How to cite:
Meunier, T., Pérez Brunius, P., Rodríguez Outerelo, J., García Carrillo, P., Ronquillo, A., Furey, H., et al. (2021). A Deep Water Dispersion Experiment in the Gulf of Mexico. Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 126, e2021JC017375. https://doi.org/10.1029/2021JC017375

Database description:
The RAFOS float is an acoustically-tracked passive drifter that tracks high resolution, deep ocean currents by recording position, temperature, and pressure at intervals ranging between 6 and 24 hours (Rossby et al., 1986).  The objective of the DWDE project was to measure the ocean circulation patterns in the western Gulf of Mexico in order to estimate the rate at which a passive tracer (e.g. pollutant, nutrients, etc.) would spread. The floats were ballasted to drift with the ocean currents at 300 dbar and 1500 dbar, simultaneously targeting the upper and lower layers of the ocean circulation. Float deployments were "stacked" where possible so that both 300 dbar and 1500 dbar floats were launched at the same locations, and deployed in pairs, triplets, or quadruplets for calculating the dispersion statistics. The planned mission lengths were either 300 days, 365 days, or 540 days and were programmed to record data every 8 hours. Some floats have shorter missions due to "sharkbite", or what is presumed to be the un-scheduled removal of a float's dropweight by a large fish. This causes immediate surfacing of the float, and the end of its underwater mission. Data report available at https://hdl.handle.net/1912/25273
The data are delivered in NetCDF format using Attribute Convention for Data Discovery version 1.3 and the CF Standard Name Table version 1.6. A text file describing the metadata is also included. The data include: time, temperature (°C), pressure (dbar), latitude, longitude, zonal velocity, meridional velocity, and a sound source interpolation flag.
For more information about database quality control and anomalies see documentation

Acknowledgment: The RAFOS database is a product with author registration in Mexico. It can be licensed for non-commerical use, and it is prohibited to share it with third parties, as well as to profit or sell products derived from it. Under these criteria, the only additional condition is that the product resulting from the use of this data includes the acknowledgments: "The acquisition of the surface drifter data from the DWDE experiment has been financed by the CONACYT-SENER-Hydrocarbons Sector Fund, Mexico (project 201441), developed by the Gulf of Mexico Research Consortium (CIGoM). We recognize PEMEX for promoting to the Fund the specific demand on oil spills and the environment. Database description and download request found here http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4118564

Reference:

Ramsey, Andree L., Furey, Heather H., Bower, Amy S., Pérez-Brunius, Paula, García-Carrillo, Paula, "The Deep Water Dispersion Experiment: RAFOS float data report June 2016 - January 2019", 2019-12. Technical report. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. DOI:10.1575/1912/25273, https://hdl.handle.net/1912/25273

Furey, H., Ramsey, A., Bower, A., and Pérez-Brunius,P.(2019) Trajectories of acoustically tracked subsurface floats in the western Gulf of Mexico from the Deep Water Dispersion Experiment. Reg. INDAUTOR Mexico (03-2019-120510230900-01, 13-Diciembre-2019)

Database description:
A gridded product, called GulfFlow, is created by averaging all available data from the GulfDrifters dataset within quarter-degree spatial bins, and within overlapping monthlong temporal bins having a semimonthly spacing. The data set runs from August 16, 1992 to August 1, 2019, for a total of 648 overlapping time slices. Odd- numbered slices correspond to calendar months, while even-numbered slices run from halfway through one month to halfway through the following month. A higher spatial resolution version, GulfFlow-1/12° is created in the identical way but using 1/12th degree bins instead of quarter-degree bins. In addition to the average velocities within each 3D bin, the count of sources contributing to each bin is also distributed, as is the subgridscale velocity variance discussed below. The count variable is a four- dimensional array of integers, the fourth dimension of which has length 30. This variable gives the number of hourly observations from each source dataset contributing to each three-dimensional bin. Values 1-15 are the count of velocities from drifters from each of the 15 experiments that have not been flagged as having lost their drogues, while values 16-30 are for observation from drifters that have been flagged as having lost their drogue. Values above 15 are only populated for the GDP, HARGOS, LASER and some of the DWDE drifters, as a drogue presence flag is not always available. The data is distributed in two separate NetCDF files, one for each grid resolution. More information about this database available in this document

Acknowledgment: GulfFLow is a product for non-commercial academic use, and it is prohibited to share it with third parties, as well as to profit or sell products derived from it. Under these criteria, the only additional condition is that the product resulting from the use of this data includes the following acknowledgments: "The GulfFlow database (http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3978793) is a product of the Gulf of Mexico Research Consortium (CIGoM) and was partially funded by the CONACYT-SENER-Hydrocarbons Sector Fund, Mexico, project 201441."

How to cite:
Lilly, J. M. and Pérez-Brunius, P.: A gridded surface current product for the Gulf of Mexico from consolidated drifter measurements.Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 13, 645-669. https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-13-645-2021, 2021.

Database description:

The data includes eddy displacement signals for all ridges, as well as the time-varying ellipse parameters and estimated ellipse center location. The instantaneous frequency is included, as is the instantaneous bias estimate derived by Lilly and Olhede (2012).The data are organized as appended trajectory data that can be readily separated through the use of the "ids" field. The ridge length (L^*) and ridge-averaged (ξ^*) are also included, as is measure of statistical significance denoted by (ρ^*). The dataset is available for download as a NetCDF file.

GOMED is a product for non-commercial academic use, and it is prohibited to share it with third parties, as well as to profit or sell products derived from it. Under these criteria, the only additional condition is that the product resulting from the use of this data includes the following acknowledgments: "The GOMED database (http://doi.org/10.5281/ zenodo.3978803) is a product of the Gulf of Mexico Research Consortium (CIGoM) and was partially funded by the CONACYT-SENER-Hydrocarbons Sector Fund, Mexico, project 201441.

How to Cite: Lilly, J. M. and Pérez-Brunius, P.: Extracting statistically significant eddy signals from large Lagrangian datasets using wavelet ridge analysis, with application to the Gulf of Mexico, Nonlin. Processes Geophys., 28, 181-212, http://doi.org/10.5194/npg-28-181-2021, 2021.

References:
Lilly, J. M. and Olhede, S. C.: Higher-order properties of analytic wavelets, IEEE T. Signal Proces., 57, 146-160, https://doi.org/10.1109/TSP.2008.2007607, 2009.
Lilly, J. M. and Olhede, S. C.: Analysis of modulated multivariate oscillations, IEEE T. Signal Proces., 60, 600-612. 2012.