North Pacific Subtropical Gyre RCLV Atlas (Version 2)

This dataset tracks Rotationally Coherent Lagrangian Vortices (RCLVs) at an 8-day resolution in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre region around Hawai’i. The ‘lat’ and ‘lon’ variables represent the center coordinates of the vortex, or the extremum of integrated relative vorticity. The contour boundaries demark the edge of the RCLV based on 32-day backward-in-time Lagrangian trajectories. In other words, eddies in this dataset represents a fluid mass of substantial size that was coherent for at least 32 days. The fluid masses are tracked through time to assign IDs and RCLV ages. The software used to generate the dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/lexi-jones/RCLVatlas (DOI: 10.5281/ZENODO.7702978).

Version 1 of the dataset (https://simonscmap.com/catalog/datasets/RCLV_atlas; DOI: 10.5281/ZENODO.8139149) only includes contours that represent features of age 32 days or older. Version 2 extends the dataset to include eddy genesis by advecting the particle sets backward-in-time to age 24, 16, and 8 days.