Gridded rotary velocity spectra and surface kinetic energy in the North and Equatorial Atlantic from HYCOM NEATL simulations, OceanParcels trajectories, and GDP drifter observations

This dataset provides gridded (1° × 1°) two-sided rotary surface velocity spectra and derived kinetic energy (KE) partitions over the North and Equatorial Atlantic. Products are computed from hourly surface velocity time series from seven tidal HYCOM (e.g., Bleck 2002) North and Equatorial Atlantic (NEATL, e.g., Xu et al., 2023) experiments, one Ocean Parcel (e.g., Delandmeter and Van Sebille, 2019) experiment conducted within on NEATL run, and Global Drifter Program (GDP, e.g., Elipot et al. 2022) hourly drifter observations (drogued and undrogued, with ARGOS+GPS and GPS-only subsets). Following Yu et al. (2019), velocity spectra are estimated on 60 day segments sampled hourly with 50 percent overlap, detrended, Hann-windowed, and FFT-shifted. The NetCDF dataset includes total, low-frequency, diurnal, semidiurnal, and near-inertial KE components, along with the underlying rotary spectra, for each data source. Full details on the data sources, variable definitions, spectral processing, and KE band integrations are provided in the accompanying README.md file. The products accompany the manuscript Laxenaire et al. (submitted) on near-surface KE distributions in the North and Equatorial Atlantic.