Arctic Sea Level Data

Arctic Sea level data from Satellite Altimetry

Altimetry data from the ERS1, ERS2 and ENVISAT are the only satellites providing sea surface height observations in the Arctic Ocean using Satellite altimetry. Due to ice-coverage the data availability will be limited, but through careful editing and re-processing of the data we have created a product which has unique spatial and temporal distribution. Use the links to access the data as along track points in 3 days portions or as gridded sea level anomalies. This is a contribution to the MONARCH-A 7th FW program and the ESA sponsored CCI study for Sea Level.  

Arctic sea level trend

Download along track data  (see section on format and processing below)
ftp:\\ftp.space.dtu.dk\pub\Altimetry\ARCTIC\Along_track 

Download grided data  (see section on format and processing below) – link to come

Contact

Yongun Cheng (cych@space.dtu.dk) or Ole B. Andersen (oa@space.dtu.dk)

Reference

Knudsen, P. and M. Brovelli (1993), Collinear and cross-over adjustment of Geosat ERM and Seasat altimeter data in the Mediterranean Sea, Surv. Geophys., 14(4-5), 449-459.
Andersen, O. B. and P. Knudsen (1998), Global marine gravity field from the ERS-1 and Geosat geodetic mission altimetry, J. Geophys. Res., 103(C4), doi:10.1029/97JC02198.

Data format

The names are given both in Julian Days relative to 1950 and in date. There are 5 columns in along-track data: track number, seconds relative to 19580101, Latitude, longitude and sea level anomaly (m). To distinguish TOPEX/Jason-1/2 with sun-synchronous satellite altimetric data, the track number was added by 90000.

Processing

In order to reduce the remaining contaminations of orbital errors to altimetric data, the crossover adjustment scheme with a bias and a tilt parameters (Knudsen and Brovelli, 1993), which has been widely used in global and regional marine gravity field development (e.g., Andersen and Knudsen, 1998), was used to improve the quality of the data.