Willapa Bay & Grays Harbor Drifter Tracks

The map plot shows tracks from simulated drifter tracks over three days from the most recent LiveOcean daily forecast.

Willapa Bay & Grays Harbor Drifter Tracks

The map plot shows tracks from simulated drifter tracks over three days from the most recent LiveOcean daily forecast. At the start time you can see the initial drifter release locations as two clusters of blue dots near the beaches north and south of Willapa Bay. The magenta lines show the tracks that the drifters take over the full three days, about six tidal cycles.

Using the "Time Slider" you can see where each particle goes in time. If you click on the map with some drifters nearby they will turn red. They will stay red when you use the Time Slider. By selecting different groups of particles at different times you can explore questions such as: Where do all the particles from the North release site go? or Where did all the particles that ended up in some place come from?

The model used here is a high-resolution model of these two estuaries, nested inside the larger LiveOcean model. It has 200 m horizontal resolution, 30 vertical layers, and wetting-and-drying of the intertidal. The particles are tracked in 3-D, including dispersion due to turbulence.

Drifters: Puget Sound Drifters: Willapa 2025 Custom

The movie has a panel at the bottom that shows time. The tide is evident in the twice-a-day variation of the sea surface height. Daytimes are shown as the thick yellow lines on the horizontal axis. Winds are shown by an arrow in the middle of the map, with the scale given by the circle. The black line off the coast on the map is the 200 m depth line, which marks the "shelf break" separating the coastal region from the deeper ocean beyond.

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Willapa Bay & Grays Harbor Drifter Tracks