Altimetry-derived tide model for improved tide and water level forecasting along the European continental shelf

Ocean Dynamics - With the continued rise in global mean sea level, operational predictions of tidal height and total water levels have become crucial for accurate estimations and understanding of...     

Global Calibration of SARAL/AltiKa Using Multi-Mission Sea Surface Height Crossovers

SARAL/AltiKa completed its first year in orbit in March 2014. The 1 Hz GDR-T data of the first 10 cycles of the mission are used to perform a comprehensive quality assessment by means of a global multi-mission crossover analysis. Within this approach, SARAL sea surface heights are compared with data from other current missions, mainly Jason-2 and Cryosat-2, to reveal its accuracy and consistency with the other altimeter systems. Alongside with global mean range bias and instrumental drifts, investigations on geographically correlated errors as well as on the realization of the systems origin are performed. The study proves the high quality and reliability of SARAL. The mission shows only a small range bias of about ?5 cm with respect to Jason-2 and neither significant time-tag bias nor instrumental drifts. With 1.3 cm the scatter of radial errors is in the same order of magnitude as for Cryosat-2 and Jason-1 GM and will probably further improve using an enhanced sea state bias (SSB) model. However, the wet tropospheric corrections from SARAL radiometer still show some systematic effects influencing the range bias as well as geographically correlated error patterns and the z-component of the origin. Improved inflight calibration will be necessary to overcome these effects.     

Potential of SARAL/AltiKa for Inland Water Applications

SARAL uses the same orbit as ERS and Envisat and can be used to extend inland water height time series derived from these missions. This article investigates the potential of SARAL for this application over the Great Lakes and the Amazon basin. SARAL/AltiKa is the first altimeter using Ka-band that is rarely influenced by ionospheric effects but susceptible for atmospheric water. Our investigations show clear waveform disruptions for SARAL due to precipitation. It is demonstrated that the quality of water heights improved when using alternative retracker products, for example, the ice-1 product. The improvement depends on the weather and yields up to 3.8 cm for wet conditions. The advantage of the smaller footprint of SARAL is demonstrated for land-water transitions where SARAL provides better water level heights up to 6 km to the lakeshore whereas Envisat is limited to about 11 km. SARAL provides also more reliable water level heights for narrow Amazon rivers than Envisat. Furthermore, the hooking effect is decreased for SARAL. Comparing water level time series of SARAL-only, Envisat-only, and multi-mission with in-situ data demonstrates that SARAL has the potential to extend Envisat long-term time series and to decrease the RMS by about 10% for large lakes and 40% for selected rivers.