North Pacific Subtropical Gyre RCLV Atlas (Version 1)

This dataset tracks Rotationally Coherent Lagrangian Vortices (RCLVs) from 2000-2019 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, any contour in this dataset represents a fluid mass that was considered 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.