Follow the World's Ocean Currents with NOAA's Adopt a Drifter Program

NOAA's Office of Climate Observation (OCO) recently launched the Adopt a Drifter Program (ADP - http://osmc.noaa.gov/OSMC/adopt_a_drifter.html) to provide an educational opportunity for K-16 teachers to infuse ocean observing system data into their curriculum while participating in NOAA’s Teacher at Sea (TAS) program (http://www.tas.noaa.gov/), although participation in the TAS program is not essential in order to adopt a drifting buoy. The ADP promotes a partnership between a school from the United States and an international school where students from both schools mutually adopt a drifting buoy to be deployed from a ship at sea. An educational sticker from each school is adhered to the drifter before deployment and teachers and their students access sea surface temperature and/or sea surface pressure data from the drifter online. Participating teachers develop lesson plans to encourage their students to plot the coordinates of the drifter on a tracking chart as it moves freely across the ocean and to make connections between the data accessed on line and other maps showing ocean currents and winds. Since drifter data are used to track major ocean currents and eddies globally, ground truth data from satellites, build models of climate and weather patterns, and predict the movement of pollutants if dumped or accidentally spilled into the sea, it is important for teachers and students to understand how the data are measured, how often data are downloaded, and what data are available for schools and the general public to access.