Captivating Animation of Oceanic Particles Around New Zealand

This animation, besides being visually captivating, also offers an opportunity to detail the processes behind its creation
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Simulation of Ocean Datacubes
Calypso Science and Oceanum have produced a 13-year ocean "hindcast," recreating wind, wave, current, and water properties for the open ocean and continental shelf regions of mainland New Zealand. Using the SCHISM hydrodynamic modeling system over an unstructured mesh, we simulated ocean currents around New Zealand with varying resolutions, ranging from 4 km to 500 m nearshore. The predicted currents were validated against in-situ and satellite observations to ensure accuracy. This hindcast is archived within an online "datacube," and is available for use (CC-BY-SA 4.0) via Oceanum’s Datamesh cloud service, along with many other datasets. High resolution datacubes can be created for any location globally.
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Particle-Tracking Models
We have developed dedicated "readers" to deploy particle-tracking models within the high-resolution oceanic datacubes. The native SCHISM outputs are ingested into the OpenDrift framework for ocean trajectory modeling. Our SCHISM reader is now openly available to the scientific community. 

Tracking Particle Dispersion
We release numerical particles and track their dispersion in the ocean. Each particle has particular properties to mimic the behavior of things like oil, larvae, plastic, icebergs etc and how they respond to the environmental conditions (e.g. water depth, waves, temperature, salinity). In this animation, passive particles are released around New Zealand and tracked for a month in the depth-averaged currents. The dispersion dynamics reveal the influence of capes and straits in connecting different regions.

Cloud Simulations and Multi-Year Tracking
Thanks to our collaboration with Oceanum, we can now deploy our simulations in the cloud, efficiently running multi-year simulations to track millions of particles and derive statistically-robust outcomes. This approach allows seamless access to other ocean "datacubes", such as Copernicus, NOAA, and ERA5.
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Applications and Solutions
Access to decadal ocean hindcasts combined with efficient particle tracking capabilities enables us to address a wide range of oceanic dispersion problems, including:

• Pollution impacts from oil spills, drifting plastics, wastewater, chemicals, viruses
• Search and rescue support
• Sediment transport, including dredging and disposal plumes
• Marine connectivity for aquaculture, plankton/fish/shellfish larvae origins and dispersion
• Tracking of icebergs, algae (sargassum), containers, unidentified floating objects

Do you have an oceanic dispersion problem? Get in touch to discuss how we can help.