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Abstract
One year of Geosat altimeter data is used for a comparison among three different processing techniques for the determination of mesoscale ocean currents. The observations, like sea surface variability and sea surface anomaly time series, yield a valuable contribution to all kinds of oceanographic studies. The article presents an a‐priori estimate of the feasible spatial and temporal resolutions of the observations by validating the different processing techniques and comparing the results. It shows an excellent correlation between the different sea surface anomaly field solutions. For the Agulhas Retroflection area it was found that the standard deviation of the obtained relative sea level may amount to up to 4 cm and that the average correlation is better than 0.90 (±0.04). The overall quality of the results obtained was shown to depend on the mesoscale signal strength and therefore differs for each region. This nonisotropic behavior of the correlation between the sea surface anomaly fields is studied in detail by analyzing the signal‐to‐noise ratio for two extreme sampling cases. In addition, the article discusses some examples of oceanographic application in the context of choosing a proper processing technique.