The goal of the Ocean Virtual Drift Challenge is to predict the position of 5 drifters a few days after their last known position, based on the drifters trajectories up to the last known position and several collocated physical fields (currents, waves, wind, etc...).
The drifters will be deployed in May during the 2025 ESA Ocean Training Course .
The game is a reconstruction problem rather than a prediction one, meaning that the participants will always have access to observed physical fields, even when drifter trajectories are unknown.
For example, to estimate a drifter position on Monday when it was last observed on the previous Thursday, participants will have access to the physical fields from the entire preceding week, as well as the drifter’s trajectory from Monday to Thursday of the preceding week.
Two rounds of predictions will be held every week (on Monday and Thursday) during about a month.
The mini-competition is due to start mid-May, and the precise schedule of the rounds will be announced here at that time.
You can subscribe to this mailing list to be notified when the competition starts and get updates after each round.
For each round and drifter, participants earn points based on the distance between their predicted position and the observed position.
Points are computed by dividing the smallest distance across participants by the distance of each participant, multiplied by the distance between the drifter's position at time t0 and the drifter's position at time t0 + 3 days.
The participant with the highest sum of points across rounds and drifters will be declared the overall winner.
For each round (8:00 AM CET to 6:00 PM CET):