A new view of the Gulf of Mexico
These figures are the highest-resolution maps of the observed Gulf of Mexico surface currents created to date, revealing a number of major features not apparent in satellite-derived gridded products. They were formed by gathering together all available drifter data into consolidated trajectory and gridded datasets that are shared freely with other researchers. How one averages in time turns out to be surprisingly important for avoiding artifacts in non-uniformly distributed Lagrangian datasets such as this one. See our new paper, Lilly and PĂ©rez-Brunius (2021) at Earth System Science Data, for details.