Abstract

Non-tidal aliasing in seasonal sea-level variability and annual Rossby waves as observed by satellite altimetry

Highlights

  • The accuracy of altimetric sea-level measurements has been steadily improving towards a striking level of 1±2 cm during the past few years (Fu et al, 1994; Cheney et al, 1994; Stammer and Wunsch, 1994; Shum et al, 1995; Le Traon et al, 1995), thanks to the signi®cant advances in satellite technology, remotesensing instruments, as well as geophysical modelling and data processing

  • Alias problems in satellite altimetry are usually addressed in connection with ocean tides, which are most detectable due to their well-de®ned frequencies associated with high energies

  • The signals are known to have periods of less than 20 days and they are certainly not annual Rossby waves, the possibility of their Rossby-wave origin cannot be completely ruled out. It is worth mentioning the recent ®nding by Chelton and Schlax (1996) that the TOPEX/POSEIDON-observed propagation speeds of Rossby waves are systematically higher than those predicted from standard theory

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Summary

Introduction

The accuracy of altimetric sea-level measurements has been steadily improving towards a striking level of 1±2 cm during the past few years (Fu et al, 1994; Cheney et al, 1994; Stammer and Wunsch, 1994; Shum et al, 1995; Le Traon et al, 1995), thanks to the signi®cant advances in satellite technology, remotesensing instruments, as well as geophysical modelling and data processing. With considerable minimization of the uncertainties in orbit determination and environmental corrections, an intrinsic systematic source of error in altimeter measurements known as aliasing, resulting from asynoptic sampling, becomes an emerging challenge to many geophysical applications This can be seen from the fact that, in recent altimetric studies, aliasing is a frequently mentioned source of error Numerical experiments are designed under previously developed theory to simulate the overall aliasing involved in each case These two examples are selected because, on one hand, they are geophysically important and observationally favourable; and on the other, they are aliasing representative and cover all four dimensions of the problem.

A brief summary of altimetric aliasing
Case 1: seasonal sea-level variability
Case 2: annual Rossby waves
Concluding remarks

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