Overview and Update of the Sea State Bias Corrections for the Jason-2, Jason-1 and TOPEX Missions

Abstract

We present a Jason-2 sea state bias (SSB) model from the first year of GDR products along with updates of Jason-1, TOPEX-A, and TOPEX-B solutions. Our re-evaluation of the Jason-1 SSB focused on data from the new version (C) of the GDR while for TOPEX, the updated solutions benefited from the availability of both a set of new precise orbits that are consistent with Jason-2 and an updated set of state-of-the-art geophysical corrections. Therefore, derived from homogeneous sea surface height (SSH) data to minimize geographically correlated SSH differences between missions, these empirical SSB models contribute to the consistency between Jason-2 and Jason-1 SSH data and between TOPEX and Jason-1 data during their respective tandem phase and thus to the stability of the whole altimetry system over the past 17-year period.

Keywords:

• Sea state bias
• Jason-2
• Jason-1
• TOPEX
• empirical estimation
• nonparametric models

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers who provided valuable comments that lead us to produce a significantly more comprehensive paper than originally submitted. This work was performed within activities supported by the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) in France.