Drifting At Sea
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- Visualizations by:
- Greg Shirah and
- Horace Mitchell
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- Written by:
- Greg Shirah
- View full credits
When a research buoy is released in the ocean, where does it go? In a visualization experiment using ocean buoy data from NOAA's Global Drifter Database, NASA data visualizers depicted the migration of these floating science platforms in Earth's oceans. Over the last 35 years, NOAA has deployed thousands of ocean buoys worldwide. The buoys travel with currents, collecting important measurements of ocean properties like temperature and salinity that scientists use for weather forecasting and verifying observations from Earth-observing satellites. In the visualization, the buoys are seen migratating over time to five known gyres in the ocean where marine debris accumulates, the so-called ocean garbage patches. The visualizers used a computational model of Earth's ocean currents and virtual particles to confirm the result. Watch the video to learn more.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio
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Animators
- Greg Shirah (NASA/GSFC) [Lead]
- Horace Mitchell (NASA/GSFC) [Lead]
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Writer
- Greg Shirah (NASA/GSFC) [Lead]
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Project support
- Ian Jones (ADNET Systems, Inc.)
- Laurence Schuler (ADNET Systems, Inc.)
- Leann Johnson (Global Science and Technology, Inc.)
Related pages
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ID: 4174 Visualization
Garbage Patch Visualization Experiment
Read moreWe wanted to see if we could visualize the so-called ocean garbage patches. We start with data from floating, scientific buoys that NOAA has been distributing in the oceans for the last 35-year represented here as white dots. Let's speed up time to see where the buoys go... Since new buoys are continually released, it's hard to tell where older buoys move to. Let's clear the map and add the starting locations of all the buoys... Interesting patterns appear all over the place. Lines of buoys are due to ships and planes that released buoys periodically. If we let all of the buoys go at the same time, we can observe buoy migration patterns. The number of buoys decreases because some buoys don't last as long as others. The buoys migrate to 5 known gyres also called ocean garbage patches.We can also see this in a computational model of ocean currents called ECCO-2. We release particles evenly around the world and let the modeled currents carry the particles. The particles from the model also migrate to the garbage patches. Even though the retimed buoys and modeled particles did not react to currents at the same times, the fact that the data tend to accumulate in the same regions show how robust the result is.The dataset used for the ocean buoy visualization is the Global Drifter Database from the GDP Drifter Data Assembly Center, part of the NOAA Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory. The data covered the period February 1979 through September 2013. Although the actual dataset has a wealth of data, including surface temperatures, salinities, etc., only the buoy positions were used in the visualization.This visualization was accepted as one of the "Dailies" at SIGGRAPH 2015. ||
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