Surface drifters in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico

Abstract

An overview of a year-long field program presently underway in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico is presented. Since February 1996, biweekly deployments of 12-15 air-deployed, satellite-tracked drifters have helped to characterize ocean circulation features along the shelf and shelf-break regions. The devices used are the Davis-style Lagrangian drifters that follow the top 1 meter of the water column and report positions several times a day. The data set being generated is useful for many applications, such as comparisons with results from numerical models of ocean circulation, oil-spill trajectory models, etc. Recent results are presented.