Altimeter Repeat-Track Analysis-A Comparison of Various Algorithms for Producing the Mean Profile

Abstract

Abstract Sea surface height may be measured by a satellite-borne altimeter and its along-track slope used to infer geostrophic currents. A major difficulty is that, in general, the local geoid and satellite orbit are not known to the accuracy desired. Thus, comparison is often made between repeat flights of an altimeter along fixed ground tracks in order to infer the changes in the currents. In practice, it is convenient to calculate mean height profile from many repeat passes and use this as a reference, so that individual altimetric profiles yield variations about this mean. It is thus important to derive a high-quality reliable estimate of the altimetric mean in order to minimize the errors in the inferred flows for the individual repeats. This work examines various methods for deriving the mean profile. Using simulations, it is shown that the error of an algorithm in retrieval of the original mean can be expressed as the sum of the error due to oceanographic signals and random noise (which is the same...