Mid Atlantic Drifter Program: Development of Software Toolbox to Manage Drifter Data

A MATLAB toolbox has been developed to calculate drifter velocities at regular timesteps matching High Frequency radar (HFR) data output. This allows the user to compare drifter velocities to nearby radial and total velocities, calculate statistics (correlation coefficient and root mean square error (RMSE) and create figures of the comparisons. The drifter data is quality controlled and output as netCDF files. Drifter velocities are rotated to obtain the velocity component matching the heading angle of the nearest radar radial measurement, and plotted as time-series line plots of radial vector components with matching rotated drifter velocity component. Multiple HFR datasets can be compared at once for the same drifter dataset, allowing for easy comparison of quality controlled vs. non-quality-controlled data, for example. The toolbox is curated at https://github.com/lnazzaro/hfr-drifters/wiki The toolbox was utilized to process and organize drifter data from NOAA and the United States Coast Guard. This regional drifter dataset was compared to the NOAA Global Drifter Data set.