Reduction of spatially structured errors in wide-swath altimetric satellite data using data assimilation

• Published in: Remote Sensing
• Main Authors: Metref, Sammy, Cosme, Emmanuel, Le Sommer, Julien, Poel, Nora, Brankart, Jean-Michel, Verron, Jacques, Gomez-Navarro, Laura
• Other Authors: Agence Nationale de la Recherche (France), Centre National D'Etudes Spatiales (France)
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute 2019
• Subjects: SWOT; correlated errors; OSSE; projection; detrending; ensemble kalman filter; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10261/204569; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111336; https://doi.org/10.13039/501100001665; https://doi.org/10.13039/501100002830

The SurfaceWater and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission is a next generation satellite mission expected to provide a 2 km-resolution observation of the sea surface height (SSH) on a two-dimensional swath. Processing SWOT data will be challenging because of the large amount of data, the mismatch between a high spatial resolution and a low temporal resolution, and the observation errors. The present paper focuses on the reduction of the spatially structured errors of SWOT SSH data. It investigates a new error reduction method and assesses its performance in an observing system simulation experiment. The proposed error-reduction method first projects the SWOT SSH onto a subspace spanned by the SWOT spatially structured errors. This projection is removed from the SWOT SSH to obtain a detrended SSH. The detrended SSH is then processed within an ensemble data assimilation analysis to retrieve a full SSH field. In the latter step, the detrending is applied to both the SWOT data and an ensemble of model-simulated SSH fields. Numerical experiments are performed with synthetic SWOT observations and an ensemble from a North Atlantic, 1/60° simulation of the ocean circulation (NATL60). The data assimilation analysis is carried out with an ensemble Kalman filter. The results are assessed with root mean square errors, power spectrum density, and spatial coherence. They show that a significant part of the large scale SWOT errors is reduced. The filter analysis also reduces the small scale errors and allows for an accurate recovery of the energy of the signal down to 25 km scales. In addition, using the SWOT nadir data to adjust the SSH detrending further reduces the errors. This research was funded by ANR (project number ANR-17-CE01-0009-01) and CNES through the OST/ST and the SWOT Science Team.