Arctic sea surface height maps from multi-altimeter combination

• Published in: Earth System Science Data
• Main Authors: P. Prandi, J.-C. Poisson, Y. Faugère, A. Guillot, G. Dibarboure
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Copernicus Publications 2021
• Subjects: geo; envir; Arctic; Arctic Ocean; ice covered areas
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-13-5469-2021; https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/13/5469/2021/essd-13-5469-2021.pdf; https://doaj.org/article/702bd31bdcdc400a88e8665432954f68

We present a new Arctic sea level anomaly dataset based on the combination of three altimeter missions using an optimal interpolation scheme. Measurements from SARAL/AltiKa, CryoSat-2 and Sentinel-3A are blended together, providing an unprecedented resolution for this type of product. Such high-resolution products are necessary to tackle some contemporaneous science questions in the basin. We use the adaptive retracker to process both open ocean and lead echoes on SARAL/AltiKa, thus removing the need to estimate a bias between open ocean and ice-covered areas. The usual processing approach, involving an empirical retracking algorithm on specular echoes, is applied on CryoSat-2 and Sentinel-3A synthetic aperture radar (SAR) mode echoes. SARAL/AltiKa also provides the baseline for the cross-calibration of CryoSat-2 and Sentinel-3A data. The final gridded fields cover all latitudes north of 50∘ N, on a 25 km EASE2 grid, with one grid every 3 d over 3 years from July 2016 to April 2019. When compared to tide gauge measurements available in the Arctic Ocean, the combined product exhibits a much better performance than mono-mission datasets with a mean correlation of 0.78 and a mean root-mean-square deviation (RMSd) of 5 cm. The effective temporal resolution of the combined product is 3 times better than a single mission analysis. This dataset can be downloaded from https://doi.org/10.24400/527896/a01-2020.001 (Prandi, 2020).