Articles | Volume 19, issue 20
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-19-10223-2026
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-19-10223-2026
Model description paper
 | 
28 Oct 2026
Model description paper |  | 28 Oct 2026

OceanTracker 0.5: fast adaptable Lagrangian particle tracking in structured and unstructured grids

Ross Vennell, Laurin Steidle, Malcolm Smeaton, Romain Chaput, and Ben Knight

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Cited articles

Ainsworth, C., Chassignet, E. P., French-McCay, D., Beegle-Krause, C. J., Berenshtein, I., Englehardt, J., Fiddaman, T., Huang, H., Huettel, M., Justic, D., Kourafalou, V. H., Liu, Y., Mauritzen, C., Murawski, S., Morey, S., Özgökmen, T., Paris, C. B., Ruzicka, J., Saul, S., Shepherd, J., Socolofsky, S., Solo Gabriele, H., Sutton, T., Weisbergm R. H., Wilson, C., Zheng, L., and Zheng, Y.: Ten years of modeling the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Environ. Model. Softw., 142, 105070, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2021.105070, 2021. a
Atalah, J., South, P. M., Briscoe, D. K., and Vennell, R.: Inferring parental areas of juvenile mussels using hydrodynamic modelling, Aquaculture, 555, 738227, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aquaculture.2022.738227, 2022. a, b, c
Chaput, R., Sochala, P., Miron, P., Kourafalou, V. H., and Iskandarani, M.: Quantitative uncertainty estimation in biophysical models of fish larval connectivity in the Florida Keys, ICES J. Mar. Sci., 79, 609–632, 2022. a
Dagestad, K.-F., Röhrs, J., Breivik, Ø., and Ådlandsvik, B.: OpenDrift v1.0: a generic framework for trajectory modelling, Geosci. Model Dev., 11, 1405–1420, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-11-1405-2018, 2018. a, b
Delandmeter, P. and van Sebille, E.: The Parcels v2.0 Lagrangian framework: new field interpolation schemes, Geosci. Model Dev., 12, 3571–3584, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-12-3571-2019, 2019. a
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Short summary
Ocean currents transport everything from pollution to marine larvae, but tracking millions of virtual particles to understand these movements typically requires weeks of computer processing. OceanTracker solves this bottleneck by being over ten times faster than existing tools, completing million-particle simulations in under an hour on standard computers. This speed breakthrough enables scientists to generate heat maps and analyze connectivity patterns between ocean regions.
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