Abstract. High-frequency radar, HFR, is a cost-effective monitoring
technique that allows us to obtain high-resolution continuous surface currents,
providing new insights for understanding small-scale transport processes in
the coastal ocean. In the last years, the use of Lagrangian metrics to study
mixing and transport properties has been growing in importance. A common condition
among all the Lagrangian techniques is that complete spatial and temporal
velocity data are required to compute trajectories of virtual particles in the
flow. However, hardware or software failures in the HFR system can compromise the
availability of data, resulting in incomplete spatial coverage fields or
periods without data. In this regard, several methods have been widely used
to fill spatiotemporal gaps in HFR measurements. Despite the growing
relevance of these systems there are still many open questions concerning the
reliability of gap-filling methods for the Lagrangian assessment of
coastal ocean dynamics. In this paper, we first develop a new methodology to
reconstruct HFR velocity fields based on self-organizing maps (SOMs). Then, a
comparative analysis of this method with other available gap-filling
techniques is performed, i.e., open-boundary modal analysis (OMA) and data
interpolating empirical orthogonal functions (DINEOFs). The performance of
each approach is quantified in the Lagrangian frame through the computation
of finite-size Lyapunov exponents, Lagrangian coherent structures and
residence times. We determine the limit of applicability of each method
regarding four experiments based on the typical temporal and spatial gap
distributions observed in HFR systems unveiled by a K-means clustering
analysis. Our results show that even when a large number of data are missing,
the Lagrangian diagnoses still give an accurate description of oceanic
transport properties.