Clustered and gridded particle trajectories from the surface velocity field of a Regional Oceanic Modeling System (ROMS) simulation of the northern Gulf of Mexico for a generic winter and summer

Semi-Lagrangian particle tracking is conducted to examine the ability of surface drifters to reproduce Eulerian velocity structure functions in the northern Gulf of Mexico for a generic winter (January, February, March) and summer (July, August, September). Near-surface drifters are tracked by the Lagrangian TRANSport model (LTRANS) with a 30-minute averaged Eulerian velocity field produced by Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) at 0.5 km resolution in summer and winter, and 0.5 km resolution in winter only. Forcing for the models used a set of climatological datasets. The atmospheric forcing is climatological, with a QuikSCAT-based daily product of scatterometer wind stresses (Risien and Chelton 2008), Common Ocean Reference Experiment (CORE; Large and Yeager 2009) monthly heat-flux atmospheric forcing, and Hamburg Ocean Atmosphere Parameters and Fluxes from Satellite Data (HOAPS; Andersson et al. 2010) monthly freshwater atmospheric forcing. No tidal forcing is used, and a daily river forcing is applied based on daily river volume flux data from the USGS for the year 2010. This dataset supports the publication: Pearson, J., Fox-Kemper, B., Barkan, R., Choi, J., Bracco, A., & McWilliams, J. C. (2019). Impacts of Convergence on Structure Functions from Surface Drifters in the Gulf of Mexico. Journal of Physical Oceanography, 49(3), 675–690. doi:10.1175/jpo-d-18-0029.1.