Florent Lyard (LEGOS, France); Mathilde Cancet (NOVELTIS, France); Damien Allain (LEGOS, France); Amandine Guillot (CNES, France); Nicolas Picot (CNES, France)

Thanks to its current accuracy and maturity, altimetry is considered as a fully operational observing system dedicated to scientific and operational applications. In order to access the targeted ocean signal, altimeter measurements are corrected for several geophysical parameters among which the ocean tide correction is one of the most critical. The accuracy of tidal models has been much improved during the last 20 years. Still, significant errors remain mainly in shelf seas and in polar regions.
In this context, a new global tidal model, FES 2014, has been developed and finalized in 2015: it takes advantage of longer altimeter time series, improved modelling and data assimilation techniques, a corrected bathymetry field, a higher resolution mesh and a larger assimilation dataset including tidal gauges. Compared to other global tidal models, FES 2014 shows very good performances in all shallow water regions, in Arctic regions and in some deep ocean regions also.
Last improvement concerns the computation of a new loading tide solution based on the FES2014 oceanic tide model, and computed in collaboration with J.P. Boy. The FES2014 oceanic tide has also been updated to take into account the new loading tide through an iterative process.
New FES2014 oceanic and loading tide model performances have been estimated thanks to comparisons to tidal gauges and altimeter measurements, and validation results are presented here.