This CD-ROM contains the data of satellite-tracked surface drifters in the Mediterranean Sea for the period 2 June 1986 to 11 November 1999.

The drifters were deployed in the Mediterranean Sea for sientific and operational purposes by various institutions from different countries. Their raw data were kindly made available to be inserted into this common database.

The raw drifter data, essentially position (latitude and longitude) and sea surface temperature, were first reduced and edited for spikes and outliers. They were them interpolated at uniformally distributed times, low-pass filtered and sub-sampled at 6-hour intervals.

A html-based browser was designed to facilitate access to the data. Individual plots (trajectories and time-series), composite trajectory plots (spaghetti diagrams) and animations as well as documentation on the data processing are easily accessible through standard HTML documents, and can be visualized using a web viewer such as Netscape or similar. The processed drifter data are also provided in the form of MATLAB binary files.

This product is the collective work of  Pierre-Marie Poulain, Riccardo Barbanti, Roberto Cecco, Carolina Fayos, Elena Mauri, Laura Ursella and Pietro Zanasca. Funding was principally provided by a grant from the United States Office of Naval Research to Pierre-Marie Poulain. The original raw drifter data was provided by the following institutes: Naval Postgraduate School, NATO Undersea Research Centre, Naval Oceanography Office, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Ente per le Nuove Tecnologie, l'Energia e l'Ambiente, Universita degli Studi di Napoli "Parthenope",  Telespazio and Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale.
 

Main Sponsor:





Technical Report 78/2004/OGA/31, OGS, Trieste, Italy

Approved by Dr. A. Crise,
Director, Oceanography Department

24 December 2004