SO503, Spring 2007

Drifter Lab

Over spring break we deployed a drifter in the Severn River, and got the data back from the ARGOS system.  A quick decoding of the data in the spreadsheet enabled us to get the plot above.  This only displays about 1/4 of the points in the file, and the time labels are not very good (they are hours as reported by the GPS on the drifter, without the days).  Since the final plot might become very complex, we will want a way to filter the data to show only a single day, or tidal cycle, or other appropriate subset.

Your job, working in groups of two or three, is to prepare a spreadsheet to decode all the data in the spreadsheet and transform it into a format that we can use to plot the position and trajectory of the drifter.  This will be a single file with the positions in chronological order.  You will include directions for how to manipulate the spreadsheet to get the output file, so that we can give the spreadsheet and directions to one of our technicians so they can process the deployments of multiple drifters in support of our research project looking at the oyster bars of College Creek.

We will verify the operation of your spreadsheet with an updated file with the latest downloads from the drifter.  We will evaluate it based on the quality of the final, labeled map that we can produce.