Monitoring Sea Level in the Coastal Zone with Satellite Altimetry and Tide Gauges

Cipollini, Paolo; Calafat, Francesc; Jevrejeva, Svetlana; Melet, Angélique; Prandi, Pierre

doi:10.1007/s10712-016-9392-0

Cited by 134 publications

(100 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…The challenge becomes even more complicated in the coastal zone where backscattered energy from land areas contaminates the radar pulses and sea surface conditions may have short correlation lengths. However, recent studies have demonstrated that it is possible to extract information from radar pulses in the coastal zones (see, e.g., [29,41,42]). This requires so called retracking of the radar waveforms, i.e., algorithms optimized for radar pulses backscattered from a mix of land and sea are applied.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Observed Sea-Level Changes along the Norwegian Coast

Breili

Simpson

Nilsen

2017

JMSE

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Norway's national sea level observing system consists of an extensive array of tide gauges, permanent GNSS stations, and lines of repeated levelling. Here, we make use of this observation system to calculate relative sea-level rates and rates corrected for glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) along the Norwegian coast for three different periods, i.e., 1960 to 2010, 1984 to 2014, and 1993 to 2016. For all periods, the relative sea-level rates show considerable spatial variations that are largely due to differences in vertical land motion due to GIA. The variation is reduced by applying corrections for vertical land motion and associated gravitational effects on sea level. For 1960 to 2010 and 1984 to 2014, the coastal average GIA-corrected rates for Norway are 2.0 ± 0.6 mm/year and 2.2 ± 0.6 mm/year, respectively. This is close to the rate of global sea-level rise for the same periods. For the most recent period, 1993 to 2016, the GIA-corrected coastal average is 3.5 ± 0.6 mm/year and 3.2 ± 0.6 mm/year with and without inverse barometer (IB) corrections, respectively, which is significantly higher than for the two earlier periods. For 1993 to 2016, the coastal average IB-corrected rates show broad agreement with two independent sets of altimetry. This suggests that there is no systematic error in the vertical land motion corrections applied to the tide-gauge data. At the same time, altimetry does not capture the spatial variation identified in the tide-gauge records. This could be an effect of using altimetry observations off the coast instead of directly at each tide gauge. Finally, we note that, owing to natural variability in the climate system, our estimates are highly sensitive to the selected study period. For example, using a 30-year moving window, we find that the estimated rates may change by up to 1 mm/year when shifting the start epoch by only one year.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Applications of satellite altimetry in coastal areas (closer than about 30 km to the land) are especially demanding [29]. In the coastal zones, the quality of the range measurements is degraded because the radar pulses are reflected partly from land and partly from the sea.…”

Section: Analysis Of Altimetry Data From the Norwegian Coastmentioning

confidence: 99%

Observed Sea-Level Changes along the Norwegian Coast

Breili

Simpson

Nilsen

2017

JMSE

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“…Nevertheless, current altimeters still present strong limitations in observing small-scale features O(10 km) not only due to noise but also due to temporal sampling (Chavanne and Klein, 2010). Finally, it is worth mentioning that current altimeters still have difficulties in providing measurements at distances between 10 and 50 km from the coast in spite of the advances made during the recent years (Cipollini et al, 2017).…”

Section: Currents From Sea Surface Heightmentioning

confidence: 99%

Remote sensing of ocean surface currents: a review of what is being observed and what is being assimilated

Isern‐Fontanet

Ballabrera-Poy

Turiel

et al. 2017

Nonlin. Processes Geophys.

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Abstract. Ocean currents play a key role in Earth's climate -they impact almost any process taking place in the ocean and are of major importance for navigation and human activities at sea. Nevertheless, their observation and forecasting are still difficult. First, no observing system is able to provide direct measurements of global ocean currents on synoptic scales. Consequently, it has been necessary to use sea surface height and sea surface temperature measurements and refer to dynamical frameworks to derive the velocity field. Second, the assimilation of the velocity field into numerical models of ocean circulation is difficult mainly due to lack of data. Recent experiments that assimilate coastal-based radar data have shown that ocean currents will contribute to increasing the forecast skill of surface currents, but require application in multidata assimilation approaches to better identify the thermohaline structure of the ocean. In this paper we review the current knowledge in these fields and provide a global and systematic view of the technologies to retrieve ocean velocities in the upper ocean and the available approaches to assimilate this information into ocean models.

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“…For a full description of the corrections the reader is referred to Fu & Cazenave 13 (2001). The progress of satellite altimetry has been fostered by the developments in orbit 14 determination (Rudenko et al, 2014), in the corrections (Handoko et al, 2017) and in 15 the range retrieval, based on the fitting of a functional form to the received signal in a 16 procedure called retracking (Cipollini et al, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

ALES+: Adapting a homogenous ocean retracker for satellite altimetry to sea ice leads, coastal and inland waters

Passaro¹,

Rose²,

Andersen³

et al. 2018

Remote Sensing of Environment

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Water level from sea ice-covered oceans is particularly challenging to retrieve with satellite radar altimeters due to the different shapes assumed by the returned signal compared with the standard open ocean waveforms. Valid measurements are scarce in large areas of the Arctic and Antarctic Oceans, because sea level can only be estimated in the openings in the sea ice (leads and polynyas). Similar signal-related problems affect also measurements in coastal and inland waters.This study presents a fitting (also called retracking) strategy (ALES+) based on a subwaveform retracker that is able to adapt the fitting of the signal depending on the sea state and on the slope of its trailing edge. The algorithm modifies the existing Adaptive Leading Edge Subwaveform retracker originally designed for coastal waters, and is applied to Envisat and ERS-2 missions.The validation in a test area of the Arctic Ocean demonstrates that the presented strategy is more precise than the dedicated ocean and sea ice retrackers available in the

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Monitoring Sea Level in the Coastal Zone with Satellite Altimetry and Tide Gauges

Cited by 134 publications

References 55 publications

Observed Sea-Level Changes along the Norwegian Coast

Observed Sea-Level Changes along the Norwegian Coast

Remote sensing of ocean surface currents: a review of what is being observed and what is being assimilated

ALES+: Adapting a homogenous ocean retracker for satellite altimetry to sea ice leads, coastal and inland waters

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