Drifter Launch Strategies Based on Lagrangian Templates

Abstract

A basin-scale, reduced-gravity model is used to study how drifter launch strategies affect the accuracy of Eulerian velocity fields reconstructed from limited Lagrangian data. Optimal dispersion launch sites are found by tracking strongly hyperbolic singular points in the flow field. Lagrangian data from drifters launched from such locations are found to provide significant improvement in the reconstruction accuracy over similar but randomly located initial deployments. The eigenvalues of the hyperbolic singular points in the flow field determine the intensity of the local particle dispersion and thereby provide a natural timescale for initializing subsequent launches. Aligning the initial drifter launch in each site along an outflowing manifold ensures both high initial particle dispersion and the eventual sampling of regions of high kinetic energy, two factors that substantially affect the accuracy of the Eulerian reconstruction. Reconstruction error is reduced by a factor of ?2.5 by using a continual launch strategy based on both the local stretching rates and the outflowing directions of two strong saddles located in the dynamically active region south of the central jet. Notably, a majority of those randomly chosen launch sites that produced the most accurate reconstructions also sampled the local manifold structure.