CODE Surface Drifter Position Data in Lake Erie, the Great Lakes region by NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory from 2025-06-03 to 2025-08-08 (NCEI Accession 0313792)

This dataset contains satellite-tracked CODE surface drifter data collected from Lake Erie in the Great Lakes region. Five drifters were deployed in western Lake Erie at the base of the Detroit River from a US Coast Guard vessel on June 3, 2025. The drifters are built following the CODE-type design described in Construction Of The Eddie Drifter (Version 1.2, 2010) by the NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory. These drifters float in the upper 1.5 meters of the water column and move dependent on lake circulation near the surface.
Drifters were deployed in a similar position and time following a similar deployment as in Choi et al. 2020. After the drifters were deployed, they floated freely with lake surface currents and reported their position back to shore via satellite. They float freely until they are beached on shore. The longest deployment went through August 8, 2025. This dataset includes a .csv file for each drifter and reports the date and time in UTC and position in latitude and longitude. The dataset also includes a .png file for each deployment showing dots for each reported location.