Abstract's details
What Cryosat-2 revealed about existing MSS models in coastal regions
CoAuthors
Event: 2014 Ocean Surface Topography Science Team Meeting
Session: The Geoid, Mean Sea Surfaces and Mean Dynamic Topography
Presentation type: Type Oral
Contribution: PDF file
Abstract:
The DTU13MSS is the latest release of the global high resolution mean sea surface from DTU Space with improvement in time-series extension to 20 years and ingestion on Cryosat-2 data in the Arctic.
The mean profiles used for as backbone in the derivation of MSS are only available along repeated tracks from the Jason-1 and ENVISAT satellites. Using an altimetric MSS will consequently be very adequate for the correction/referencing of repeat-track altimetric observations like Jason-2 and AltiKa (operating along ENVISAT groundtracks).
What happens when observations move away from the repeated tracks? Cryosat-2 has fundamentally different ground tracks and also provides observations extremely close to the coast compared with conventional altimetry. We have consequently tried to investigate some of the problems that arise close to the coast using 4 years of Cryosat-2 altimetric observations. One of the first findings has been that in several locations not only the MSS degrades, but the degradation in other range corrections like the ocean tide corrections is basically equally problematic. However in regions like the fjords of Eastern Greenland lack of conventional altimetric observations for the generation of existing MSS is proven to be problematic for the accuracy of the MSS models.
The mean profiles used for as backbone in the derivation of MSS are only available along repeated tracks from the Jason-1 and ENVISAT satellites. Using an altimetric MSS will consequently be very adequate for the correction/referencing of repeat-track altimetric observations like Jason-2 and AltiKa (operating along ENVISAT groundtracks).
What happens when observations move away from the repeated tracks? Cryosat-2 has fundamentally different ground tracks and also provides observations extremely close to the coast compared with conventional altimetry. We have consequently tried to investigate some of the problems that arise close to the coast using 4 years of Cryosat-2 altimetric observations. One of the first findings has been that in several locations not only the MSS degrades, but the degradation in other range corrections like the ocean tide corrections is basically equally problematic. However in regions like the fjords of Eastern Greenland lack of conventional altimetric observations for the generation of existing MSS is proven to be problematic for the accuracy of the MSS models.