DriftDeck

DriftDeck is a web app (with an optional mobile companion) for oceanographers planning and documenting surface drifter and dye deployments. It helps teams choose release points, estimate drift corridors, and generate a field-ready deployment package (maps, waypoints, checklists, and metadata templates). The app pulls in public currents and winds, then runs simple, transparent trajectory ensembles so users can see best-case/worst-case drift over the next hours to days. It also standardizes deployment metadata (IDs, sensors, timestamps, photos, recovery notes) to reduce lost context after a cruise. This is not a magic “perfect forecast” tool—coastal currents and submesoscale variability will still bite—but it can meaningfully reduce wasted ship time, missed recoveries, and messy post-cruise data provenance. It’s a traditional app with light AI for auto-filling logs from photos/voice notes.