Impacts of altimeter corrections on local linear sea level trends around Taiwan

Abstract

Multi-mission altimeter measurements from TOPEX, Jason-1, and Jason-2 satellite altimetry over the 1993–2009 time span are used to characterize the local linear sea level trend (LSLT) around Taiwan. The results show that the long-term changes of default geophysical and range corrections, i.e. the inverted barometer correction, wet tropospheric correction, and sea state bias correction, have significant impacts on the determination of local LSLT. The trend of default corrections contribute more than 1.4 mm year⁻¹ along the coastline of China mainland and 2.1 mm year⁻¹ to local LSLT in the Taiwan Strait. The default-corrected altimetric data exhibit highest and lowest local LSLTs in the southeast and northwest of Taiwan, respectively. The regional LSLTs of 3.8 mm year⁻¹ and 4.6 mm year⁻¹ are estimated from the default-corrected and uncorrected altimetric data in the study area, respectively.

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the project ‘MyOcean’, which is granted by the European Commission within the GMES Programme (7th Framework Programme); the Open Fund of State Key Laboratory of Tropical Oceanography; the South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. LTO1108); and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41006108). We thank RADS (Radar Altimeter Database System) for providing altimetric data. The comments from anonymous reviewers helped us greatly during the revision process.

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