Director of the Lagrangian Drifter Laboratory and Principal Investigator of the Global Drifter Program, Dr. Luca Centurioni joins the SWOT AdAC Consortium as Associated Member.
Dr. Luca R. Centurioni is the director of the Lagrangian Drifter Laboratory and Principal Investigator of the NOAA funded Global Drifter Program (GDP), a global array of surface drifters delivering real-time oceanographic and meteorological observations. Dr. Centurioni is also a research oceanographer, lecturer and CIMEAS fellow at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography where he conducts scientific research and advises graduate students and postdoctoral researchers.
Dr. Centurioni has joined the SWOT AdAC Consortium Steering Group as Associated Member. The role of Associated Members is to provide recommendations and act as contact point on external programs or theme of critical interest for the AdAC community, in this case Lagrangian drifters.
The Global Drifter Program (GDP) is managed and run at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) and it sustains a global array of approximately 1,250 satellite tracked drifting buoys designed to measure 15 m depth currents, sea surface temperature, atmospheric pressure and surface waves. The program is a fully-implemented part of the Global Observing initiatives funded by NOAA. Datasets are available via ERDAP files at SIO or other data archive sites
If opportunities arise, several clusters of GDP drifters will be deployed from ships of opportunity during the AdAC Intense Observation Period (IOP) beneath crossings off the Pacific coast. The sampling with be set to a sub-hourly duty cycle to capture smaller scales. The cluster of drifters will separate over time and this will provide measures of the dispersiveness of the currents. Theses data sets will support the validation of surface currents and kinematical properties measured by the SWOT satellite and provide the mesoscale circulation structure needed by collaborative groups.
SWOT AdAC Consortium members can get in touch with Luca Centurioni (lcenturioni@ucsd.edu) for more information about the Global Drifter Program.