PRACTICES, PITFALLS AND GUIDELINES IN VISUALISING LAGRANGIAN OCEAN ANALYSES

This review synthesizes two decades of research on the Greater Agulhas Current System, a major ocean current influencing climate, weather and marine life around southern Africa and beyond. Using improved observations, satellites, and computer models, we show how this system transports properties between oceans, affects rainfall and climate patterns, and marine ecosystems. The findings highlight its global climate importance and the need for sustained monitoring to better predict future change.

Macroplastic items in the ocean can move differently than the water surrounding them, because their size and density are different than that of water. We investigate how to implement this effect for macroplastic items in simulations in the North West European Shelf region. For this region we find that the large drag force makes the macroplastics trajectories very closely follow the water itself, meaning that simulating macroplastic is simpler than previously expected. 

Many climate scientists intuitively fear their credibility decreases when they engage in advocacy. We find that the opposite is the case. By surveying almost 1000 Dutch adults, we found that the credibility of a fictional climate scientists who wrote an article about the greening of gardens was higher when that text included advocacy statements, compared to when it was neutral. This is because personalization increases the goodwill of readers for the academic who writes a text.

We study how tides, wind, and waves interact at the ocean surface by tracking ultra-thin drifters released in the southern North Sea for two months. Using model data together with data-driven machine learning models, we determine the relative contribution of each forcing mechanism in driving the drifters' velocity and improve the prediction of their trajectories. We also test the generalisability of this method by applying it to the same drifters in the Tyrrhenian Sea.

We study land-water transitions of 24 small floating position-trackers that approximately mimic floating plastic litter. We describe how to automatically identify such transitions from recorded tracks, and we characterize our observations with respect to sea and wind conditions. The insights can be integrated in model simulations and used for the planning of beach cleanups. We released the trackers in the Wadden Sea, a shallow body of water that is strongly influenced by tides and wind.