Modeled locations of drifters representing transport of early life stages of Antarctic krill from 2016 to 2019

This study employed a regional ocean model of the Southern Ocean to study the pathways of Antarctic krill during early life stages. Simulated Lagrangian drifters were embedded within a 5-km horizontal resolution ocean/sea ice/ice shelf Regional Ocean Modeling System circulation model of the Southern Ocean for the period 2016-2019. The drifters include simplistic behavior of the early life stages of krill including the initial descent/ascent cycle, diel vertical migration (DVM), and advection with simulated sea ice velocity, instead of ocean velocity, under certain conditions. Four simulations were run varying different aspects (conditions under which krill were advected with sea ice velocities instead of ocean, details of DVM, details of initial descent/ascent cycle) of the simulated behavior in order to determine the impact on pathways and connectivity. Drifters were released over three separate summer seasons (2016-17, 2017-18, 2018-19) resulting in twelve separate simulation data sets (presented as individual netCDF files within this BCO-DMO dataset).