The present report describes the work carried out within task 3.1 of Work Package 3 of the SOFT Project. The above task is ‘Development of feature tracking methods’ and consists of the development of a software to track large-scale, westward propagating features (planetary waves or westward-travelling eddies) in the altimetric datasets, and in the removal of the identified features from the datasets. The residual field (that is the original dataset minus the tracked features) is then made available to the other work packages in the Project