Clustered particle trajectories from the surface velocity field of a ROMS simulation of the Northern Gulf of Mexico for a generic February and August

Lagrangian particle tracking is conducted to investigate the impact of riverine input and grid resolution on submesoscale dynamics in the northern Gulf of Mexico for Feb and Aug. Lagrangian tracers are tracked by Lagrangian TRANSport model (LTRANS) using Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) outputs with 0.5 km and 1.5 km resolutions. Two types of deployment are considered: general and circle clusters. The general cluster includes 28870 particles with an initial separation distance of 0.02 degree in a regular grid. The circle cluster includes 5019 particles with an initial separation distance of 0.005 degree in a regular grid, and the diameter of the circle is 40 km. All clusters are deployed every other day from the 2nd to the 16th of Aug and Feb, for a total of 8 deployments.