Ocean Currents

Since 1979 the Global Drifter Program has deployed satellite-tracked surface buoys across the oceans. Each buoy reports its position and the surrounding water temperature as currents carry it. Their tracks trace ocean circulation: gyres, boundary currents, and the drift between them.

Each ribbon is one buoy. Color is per-vertex sea-surface temperature: a track shifts from blue to red as the buoy enters warmer water. The full 43-year record streams as spatiotemporal tiles and plays in about two minutes.

This demo is also a data story: "Adrift" walks through the program’s history on a scroll-driven globe. A year of tracked animal migration plays the same way, on a different traveler.

stt-generate drifters --start 1979-01-01 --end 2022-11-01 \
  --temporal-bucket 7d --max-zoom 4

The generator default is 2021-only; the explicit range pulls the full 1979→2022 GDP record. Per-fix sea-surface temperature is emitted as per-vertex values to drive the color ramp.

Full recipes for every dataset live in the data-generation guide.