Data fusion of multisatellite altimetry for ocean tides modelling: a spatio-temporal approach with potential oceanographic applications

Abstract

To cite this article: Hok Sum Fok (2015) Data fusion of multisatellite altimetry for ocean tides modelling: a spatio-temporal approach with potential oceanographic applications, International Journal of Image and Data Fusion, 6:3, 232-248, Nowadays, data combination/fusion is a common practice to integrate multiple data sources into a spatially and/or temporally regular data set for facilitating analysis and interpretation. Given the advancement in active remote sensing for monitoring our changing environment (no matter ocean, land or ice), the data acquisition from various spaceborne platforms with different spatio-temporal resolutions is enormous; calling for a need of multisatellite data combination. Instead of equally or spatially weighted solution, this article illustrates a spatio-temporal combination approach that weights data both in space and in time simultaneously for ocean tide modelling using multisatellite altimetry data sets under different spatial and temporal resolutions. The tide models generated from this approach show substantial improvement near coastal regions when compared to other contemporary ocean tide models by using independent pelagic and coastal tide gauges serving as ground truth. The discrepancy of the best model is~23%, three times larger than that of the deep ocean. Further improvement lies in more and better spatio-temporal observations in the near future. We anticipate this approach can be applied to other spatio-temporal data in a similar settings for spatio-temporal dependent unknown parameters, including geodetic, geophysical, oceanographic data and imagery under different spatial and temporal resolutions.