Observation and quantification of inertial effects on the drift of floating objects at the ocean surface

A series of field experiments consisting in deploying and satellite tracking buoys of varied sizes and buoyancies have been carried out in the North Atlantic to test the importance of inertial effects, i.e., those due to finite size and buoyancy, on their drift. We show that they indeed are important and that a recently proposed Maxey--Riley theory for surface ocean inertial particle dynamics describe them with accuracy.