Sensitivity Analysis Techniques Applied to Jason-1 and Jason-2/OSTM Cross Calibration

Abstract

A sensitivity analysis is performed on the level-2 algorithms for the Jason-2/Ocean Surface Topography Mission (OSTM). This analysis quantifies how inaccuracies in the fundamental measurements impact the overall sea-surface-height measurements. The analysis is applied to examine the various biases between OSTM and Jason-1 during their formation-flying phase. We further investigate data from the formation-flying phase by analyzing a statistical artifact that manifests itself as an apparent scale error in differences of the 1-Hz ionospheric corrections from the two missions.

Keywords:

• Jason-2
• OSTM
• Jason-1
• altimetry
• calibration
• validation
• sensitivity analysis
• error budget
• ionospheric correction
• scale error
• regression dilution

Acknowledgements

The work described in this paper was performed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.