CoAuthors

Ole Anderesen (National Space Institute, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark); Richard Ray (Geodesy & Geophysics Lab., NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, United States of America); Denise Dettmering (DGFI-TUM, Germany)

Tides in the Polar regions are complicated to accurately determine due to limited coverage either from satellite altimetry or in-situ observations and due to poorly resolved bathymetry products in the region. Although several altimeters reach high latitudes, their orbits are sun-synchronous and do not allow for the estimation of the full tidal signal. The continued orbiting of Cryosat-2 provides valuable insight into the ocean tides in the polar regions, thanks to its ~28-day pseudo-cycle. This data availability has resulted in advances in the accuracy of altimetry-derived models and a deeper understanding of the spatial variability of tides in the Arctic.

Modern global tide models, which do not incorporate Cryosat-2 data, contain relatively large errors in the Foxe Basin. The Foxe Basin has an extensive tidal range with available nearby tide gauges demonstrating tidal ranges between 1.5 and 2 meters and models showing errors exceeding 10 cm for the major constituents. The Basin is very shallow and is influenced by sea ice for large portions of the year, making it a challenging region for satellite altimetry.

This forum presentation discusses three different altimetry-derived tide models utilising Cryosat-2 data for the Foxe Basin. These models are iterations of the EOT, GOT and DTU models, which contain the Cryosat-2 data. Here, these models are used to provide a general description of the tidal structure across the Basin and evaluate the performance of these models with respect to the current state of the art.