DART SURFACE DRIFTER DATABASE
Technical document
1. Organization
of the Database
Scientific and
technical information on the drifters are provided in the Scientific
document page. A gallery of
pictures (showing the drifters,
deployment and recovery operations, etc.) and movies (animations of the drifter
tracks) are available in the Pictures
& movies page.
Plots of the low-pass filtered drifter data (time series and tracks)
can be accessed in
three ways:
1)
With a search tool (Search
page) in which the
files corresponding to a given drifter ID number are listed and can be
selected.
2) Through a image navigator (Image
navigator page) which allows to
view the plots in sequenctial order
3) From a master directory
table (Master
table page) by
clicking on the file name in the first column.
Data files are located in
the
Data access page. The drifter data are provided both
at the edited and kriged levels. A Master directory table (Excel
format) is also provided.
2. Data formats
The file names
are composed of the Argos ID number of the drifter with a prefix
(a,b,c,...) corresponding to different separate tracks of the same
drifter, and followed by an extension
indicating the data type.
The edited
data are available in ASCII files. For all the drifters , the files
(b####.ed) contain:
Column #1 : Position time
(serial days where 1 corresponds
to 01-Jan-0000)
Column #2 : Latitude (deg N)
Column #3: Longitude (deg E)
Column #4 : Sensor time (serial
days where 1 corresponds
to 01-Jan-0000) (same as position time for drifters with GPS)
Column #5 : Sea surface temperature (deg C)
The low-pass
filtered and interpolated (kriged) drifter data are available in MATLAB
binary files (b####_kri.mat).
The following parameters are provided:
time = MATLAB time (serial days where 1 corresponds
to 01-Jan-0000)
lon = Longitude (deg E)
lat = Latitude (deg N)
sst = Temperature (deg C)
u = East-West component of velocity (cm/s)
v = North-south component of velocity (cm/s)