The paper provides a review of recent progresses in physical oceanography, such as results on studying ocean circulation and mesoscale ocean dynamics derived from satellite altimetry. Since 1992, satellite altimetry has provided an unprecedented 16 years monitoring of sea level and ocean circulation variations. Continuous measurements from satellites like TOPEX/Poseidon and Jason-1 help us und...

The radiometer wet tropospheric correction is a limiting factor of the application of near-coastal altimetry observations in the North Sea – Baltic Sea area. Using an ECMWF model based correction instead, we increase the return rate from 70% to 95%, with observations as close as 10 km from the coast. The altimetry and 39 coastal tide gauges are referenced to the same state of the art regional g...

There is a need to accurately link the water level to the shoreline vertical datum for various applications including coastal management, lake/river/estuary/wetland hydrological or storm surge modeling/forecasting. Coastal topography is historically surveyed and referenced to the predetermined vertical datum in terms of orthometric heights, or the heights above the geoid, which is poorly known ...

This paper presents the Coastal Altimetry Waveform Retracking Expert System (CAWRES), a novel method to optimise the Jason satellite altimetric sea levels from multiple retracking solutions. CAWRES’ aim is to achieve the highest possible accuracy of coastal sea levels, thus bringing measurement of radar altimetry data closer to the coast. The principles of CAWRES are twofold. The first is to re...

AGlobal Vertical Datum (GVD) is naturally defined by the geoid, and there is a well-established consensus to adopt Gauss-Bessel-Listing's definition of the geoid (i.e. as being the level surface of the Earth's gravity field that best fits the undisturbed sea level). Themain problem in defining the geoid is therefore to fix its constant geopotential (W0). Nevertheless, this definition can be int...

monitoring of water levels within the seas and oceans has been enhanced by application of satellite radar altimetry missions, compared to the traditional in-situ tide gauge measurements, due to their vast coverage and better spatial resolution. satellite radar altimetry, which is originally designed to measure global ocean surface height, has been applied to inland surface water hydrologic stud...

SUMMARY The Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite 2 (ICESat-2) laser altimetry mission, launched in September 2018, uses six parallel lidar tracks with very fine along-track resolution (15 m) to measure the topography of ice, ocean surfaces. Here we assess ability ICESat-2 data recover oceanographic signals ranging from surface gravity waves marine geoid. We focus on a region tropical Pacific...

The determination of the land geoid and marine involves different data sets calculation strategies. It is a hot issue at present to construct unified land–ocean quasi-geoid by fusing multi-source in coastal areas, which great significance construction integration. Classical integral algorithms such as Stokes theory find it difficult deal with heterogeneous gravity signals, so scholars have grad...

The GEOSA T spacecraft was launched into a retrograde orbit from the Western Test Range in March 1985. The first 18 months were dedicated to completing the high-resolution mapping of the marine geoid undertaken by the Seasat mission in 1978 and interrupted by its early demise. In September 1986, the spacecraft was maneuvered into an orbit more suited for oceanography. That phase of the mission ...