Global Drifter Program

[5] The current goal of the project is to use 1250 satellite-tracked surface drifting buoys to make accurate and globally dense in-situ observations of mixed layer currents, sea surface temperature, atmospheric pressure, winds and salinity, and to create a system to process the data.

[4] Horizontal transports in the oceanic mixed layer measured by the GDP are relevant to biological and chemical processes as well as physical ones.

[5] Each drifter consists of a spherical surface buoy tethered to a weighted nylon drogue that allows it to track the horizontal motion of water at a depth of 15 meters.

[6] If the drogue breaks off, the wind pushes the surface buoy through the water, creating erroneous current observations.

[4] The component at NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) manages deployments, processes and archives the data, maintains META files describing each drifter deployed, develops and distributes data-based products, and updates the GDP website Archived 2013-12-15 at the Wayback Machine.

This is a snapshot of the distribution of the drifters in the GDP. (A live tracking update of drifter locations is available through Google Earth at www .aoml .noaa .gov /phod /dac /gdp _maps .php .)
This is a picture of the drifters used in the GDP (photo by GDP).
SVP buoy fitted with a barometer (photo by DBi)
Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu and Captain Jeremy Kingston deploy a drifter off of the coast of South Africa in the Semester at Sea program , where students from the Congressional School of Virginia and Elsies River High School in South Africa adopted the drifter and will be tracking its passage through the South Atlantic. [ 10 ]