Towards Improvements on Sea Surface Height Satellite Products on the Patagonian Shelf

SARACENO, M.; ENRIQUE DONOFRIO; MONICA FIORE; WALTER GRISMEYER

Porto

Workshop; 4th Coastal Altimetry Workshop; 2010

@font-face { font-family: "Times New Roman MT Std"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 6pt; text-align: justify; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } Sea Surface Height (SSH) as measured by satellites has become a powerful tool for oceanographic and climate related studies. Whereas in open-ocean a good accuracy has been achieved, a more energetic dynamics and a number of calibration problems have limited applications over continental shelves and near the coast. In this work we compare standard products produced by AVISO (Archiving Validation and Interpretation of Satellite Data in Oceanography) and CTOH (Centre de Topographie des Océans et de l'Hydrosphère) to in-situ measures in the Patagonian shelf. The second product provides values closer to the coast and in average the comparison with coastal TGs indicates a better agreement. The two products show similar results over the continental shelf and a strong dependence with the tide model used to de-tide the along track-data. Comparison of in-situ and modeled tidal constituents indicates that the main source of error comes from failure on modeling the M2 constituent. Non-modeled nonlinear constituents also help reducing significantly the RMS of the de-tided SSH.