Comparison of Observed and Modeled Drifter Trajectories in Coastal Regions: An Improvement through Adjustments for Observed Drifter Slip and Errors in Wind Fields

Lagrangian particle tracking using three-dimensional (3D) numerical modeling approaches has become an important tool in coastal oceanography. In this note, an approach is described that can reduce the difference between observed and numerical drifter trajectories in the coastal ocean by including corrections to the water velocity due to differences between observed winds and the wind field used to drive the 3D circulation model and some specific characteristics of the observed drifters in the algorithm that estimate the numerical trajectory. Quantitative improvements are obtained whereby the separation distance between the numerical and observed drifters is almost halved (in this particular field case from 2.6 to 1.4 km day−1).