CoAuthors

Xu Qing (Key Laboratory of Coastal Disasters and Defense of Ministry of Education, Hohai University, China); Plag Hans-Peter (Mitigation and Adaptation Research Institute, Old Dominion University, United States)

In this study, response analysis of TOPEX-Jason-1-Jason-2 (T/P-Jason) primary mission and TOPEX-Jason-1 (TOPEX-Jason) interleaved mission along-track data is performed to derive 4 principal tidal constituents (M2, S2, K1 and O1) in the Bohai, Yellow and East China Seas (BYE).

The inter-comparison at crossover points and comparison with the ground truth show that the combination of TOPEX-Jason primary with TOPEX-Jason interleaved mission data are suitable for estimating the 4 principal tidal constituents in the regions. Three datasets of harmonic constants determined from tide gauge records are used to investigate the impacts of TOPEX-Jason interleaved mission data on tidal constituent estimation over the BYE regions. The accuracy of estimated tidal constituents using 18 years Topex-Jason data is slightly better than that using 10 years of Topex data (1993-2002) in comparison with tide gauge data over the coastal regions. However, comparisons with 116 tide gauge data show that the root mean square differences in amplitude are reduced by 31.26%, 38.31%, 6.62% and 7.19% (M2, S2, K1 and O1) when using primary mission and interleaved mission data to replace the Topex-Jason primary mission data for tide estimation in the study area.

Moreover, the co-tidal charts of the major tide constituents are well produced because the satellite altimetry recovers the tidal signal twice with dense ground tracks and more available measurements available in the regions.