Southern Ocean kelp particle trajectories from Kerguelen, Macquarie Island and South Georgia

Trajectory files from particle tracking simulations to model kelp drift pathways from three sub-Antarctic islands. More than 3.8 million virtual particles were released from a 2° latitude by 4° longitude box surrounding each of three sub-Antarctic source locations: Kerguelen Island, Macquarie Island and South Georgia. Particles were released daily throughout 2013 to sample seasonality and storm variability. Virtual particles were advected offline for three years from the time of release using the Connectivity Modelling System (Paris et al. 2013, https://github.com/beatrixparis/connectivity-modeling-system). Particles were advected with the sum of daily snapshots of two-dimensional surface velocity data from an eddying ocean model (HYCOM; Bleck 2002) and wave-driven Stokes drift velocities from WAVEWATCH III (Rascle and Ardhuin 2013) over the period 2013-2016, as described in further detail in Fraser et al. 2018.

Netcdf files contain particle trajectory latitude and longitude, and release date. Output has a temporal frequency of 1 day. Each release site has multiple zip files (e.g. Kerguelen_1.zip) which each contain multiple trajectory files. Each trajectory file contains a subset of the full ~ 4 million particles released at the site.

Citation of associated paper: Fraser, C. I, Dutoit, L., Morrison, A. K., Miguel Pardo, L., Smith, S., Pearman, W., Parvizi, E., Waters, J., Macaya Horta, E. (2022). Southern Hemisphere coastal ecosystems are biologically connected by frequent, long-distance rafting events, submitted to Current Biology.

References:

Bleck, R. (2002). An oceanic general circulation model framed in hybrid isopycnic-Cartesian coordinates. Ocean Modelling, 4, 55-88.

Fraser, C. I. , A. K. Morrison, A. McC Hogg, E. C. Macaya, E. van Sebille, P. G. Ryan, A. Padovan, C. Jack, N. Valdivia, J. M. Waters (2018), Antarctica’s ecological isolation will be broken by storm-driven dispersal and warming, Nat. Clim. Change, 8, 704-708.

Paris, C. B., Helgers, J., van Sebille, E., & Srinivasan, A. (2013). Connectivity Modeling System: A probabilistic modeling tool for the multi-scale tracking of biotic and abiotic variability in the ocean. Environmental Modelling and Software, 42, 47-54.

Rascle, N., and Ardhuin, F. (2013). A global wave parameter database for geophysical applications. Part 2: Model validation with improved source term parameterization. Ocean Modelling, 70, 174-188.