NASA Data Viz Wizards Model the Movement of Ocean Garbage Patches

[Greg] Hey, it's Greg Shira from NASA's

Scientific Visualization Studio.

We wanted to see if we could visualize

the so-called ocean garbage patches.

We start with data from floating scientific buoys

that NOAA has been distributing in the oceans

for the last 35 years,

represented here as white dots.

Let's speed up time to see where the buoys go.

Since new buoys are continually released,

it's hard to tell where older buoys move to.

Let's clear the map and add

the starting locations of all the buoys.

Interesting patterns appear all of the place.

Lines of buoys are due to ships and planes

that released buoys periodically.

If we let all the buoys go at the same time

we can observe buoy migration patterns.

The number of buoys decreases because some buoys

don't last as long as others.

The buoys migrate to five known gyres,

also known as ocean garbage patches.

We can also see this in a computational model

of ocean currents, called Echo 2.

We release particles evenly around the world

and the model currents carry the particles.

The particles from the model also migrate

to the garbage patches.

Even though the read-time buoys

and model particles did not react

to currents at the same times,

the fact that the data tend to accumulate

in the same regions shows how robust the result is.