ON THE ACCURACY OF JASON-2 SATELLITE SEA SURFACE HIGH DATA IN A HIGHLY DYNAMICAL COASTAL ENVIRONMENT

SARACENO, MARTÍN; RUIZ ETCHEVERRY, L.; LAGO, LORELEY ; BALLESTRINI, CARLOS; GONZÁLEZ, RAÚL

Lake Constance

Workshop; 8TH Coastal Altimetry Workshop; 2014

Over continental shelves and close to the coast the aliasing of unresolved high-frequency signals is a source of long-wavelength errors that must be corrected to make satellite altimetry measurements useful. Tides and atmospheric forcing are the main processes that generate high frequency signals closer to the coast and over continental shelves. Recent improvements in satellite altimetry data correction terms are encouraging studies of the remote sensed Sea Level Anomalies (SLA) progressively closer to the coast and over shallow continental shelves. In this work data from a bottom pressure recorder deployed during 7 months at 1 km from the coast in a highly dynamic (4m tidal amplitude) environment in the Patagonian Sea (Argentina) are compared with satellite altimetry data. Results show that uncorrected satellite data from Jason-2 correlate very well (0.98, 99% t-Student confidence level) and have a root-mean-square difference of 26 cm with in-situ data. Four tidal models and two model-derived sea-level pressure data are compared respectively with in-situ measured tide and sea-level pressure in order to study the accuracy of the main satellite-altimetry correction terms.