Arctic Ocean Gravity, Dynamic Ocean Topography and Sea Ice Thickness from CryoSat, ICESat and GOCE
Abstract
With the increased orbit inclination, CryoSat has for the first time allowed the measurement of sea ice freeboard and ocean heights from satellite altimetry north of 86N, and provide a continuation of the earlier ICESat measurements south of this latitude. In the presentation we use 1 year of CryoSat data to estimate ocean sea surface heights and derive a new Arctic gravity field, by merging of satellite altimetry, airborne and surface gravity, and GOCE. The new high-resolution geoid model shows major improvements, especially in the eastern parts of the central Arctic Ocean, where earlier geoid models were primarily based on gridded Russian data of unknown quality. Based on the new geoid model, dynamic ocean topography and sea ice freeboard is estimated using lowest-level filtering algorithms, taking into account CryoSat waveform parameters. The resulting DOT and freeboard estimates are compared to earlier ICESat-based results, showing a good agreement for DOT when converted to a common reference frame and inter-satellite biases are removed. CryoSat sea ice freeboard heights, albeit relatively noisy, confirm main sea ice thickness features, and are expected to improve significantly with the planned ESA CryoSat reprocessing ultimo 2011.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2011
- Bibcode:
- 2011AGUFM.C41A0372F
- Keywords:
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- 0750 CRYOSPHERE / Sea ice;
- 0758 CRYOSPHERE / Remote sensing;
- 1200 GEODESY AND GRAVITY;
- 4207 OCEANOGRAPHY: GENERAL / Arctic and Antarctic oceanography