Warm Core Ring Trajectories in the Northwest Atlantic Slope Sea (2011-2020)

This dataset contains weekly trajectory information of Gulf Stream Warm Core Rings from 2011-2020. This dataset is comprised of individual files containing each ring’s weekly center location and its area for 282 WCRs present between January 1, 2011 and December 31, 2020. Each Warm Core Ring and is identified by a unique alphanumeric code 'WEyyyymmddA', where 'WE' represents a Warm Eddy (as identified in the analysis charts); 'yyyymmdd' is the year, month and day of formation; and the last character 'A' represents the sequential sighting of the eddies in a particular year. Continuity of a ring which passes from one year to the next is maintained by the same character in the first sighting.  For example, the first ring in 2017 having a trailing alphabet of 'E' indicates that four rings were carried over from 2016 which were still observed on January 1, 2017. Each ring has its own netCDF (.nc) filename following its alphanumeric code. Each file contains 4 variables, “Lon”- the ring center’s weekly longitude, “Lat”- the ring center’s weekly latitude, “Area” - the rings weekly size in km², and “Date” in days - representing the week since Jan 01, 0000. 

The process of creating the WCR tracking dataset follows the same methodology of the previously generated WCR census (Gangopadhyay et al., 2019, 2020). The Jenifer Clark’s Gulf Stream Charts used to create this dataset are 2-3 times a week from 2011-2020. Thus, we used approximately 1560 Charts for the 10 years of analysis. All of these charts were reanalyzed between 75° and 55°W using QGIS 2.18.16 (2016) and geo-referenced on a WGS84 coordinate system (Decker, 1986). 

Gangopadhyay, A., G. Gawarkiewicz, N. Etige, M. Monim and J. Clark, 2019. An Observed Regime Shift in the Formation of Warm Core Rings from the Gulf Stream, Nature - Scientific Reports, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-48661-9. www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-48661-9.

Gangopadhyay, A., N. Etige, G. Gawarkiewicz, A. M. Silver, M. Monim and J. Clark, 2020.  A Census of the Warm Core Rings of the Gulf Stream (1980-2017). Journal of Geophysical Research, Oceans,  125, e2019JC016033. https://doi.org/10.1029/2019JC016033.

QGIS Development Team. QGIS Geographic Information System (2016).

Decker, B. L. World Geodetic System 1984. World geodetic system 1984 (1986).