Surface Drifter North Sea 2017-2021

'Drifter_North_Sea_2017-2021' is a dataset of high-resolution Lagrangian surface drifters from 2017-2021 for the North Sea. This covers the central North Sea area and the Skagerrak with 85 drifter trajectories by sending the position data via a Globalstar satellite transmission service. The data were subjected to a uniform processing and quality control method and were removed from outliers. They were interpolated to five-minute intervals and assimilated into a standard NetCDF structure. The dataset contains drifter position data, drifter derived current velocities and two vectors ("beached" and "filled") describing when a drifter was beached and when the dataset was filled because no GPS position was sent for more than one hour. The Langrangian measurements can contribute to a better understanding of the circulation and tidal dynamics in the North Sea and, to a large extent, can provide new insights into the North Sea region to understand complex submesoscale dynamics.