WET TROPOSPHERIC CORRECTION FOR COASTAL SATELLITE ALTIMETRY M.

Joana Fernandes(1), David Fernandes(1), Nelson Pires(1) ) Virglio Mendes(2) Alexandra L. Nunes(3) Faculdade de Cincias, Universidade do Porto Departamento de Matemtica Aplicada, Rua do Campo Alegre, 687, 4169-007, Porto, Portugal Tel: +351 220 100 878, Fax: +351 220 100 809 e-mail: mjfernan@fc.up.pt
(2) (3) (1)

Faculdade de Cincias, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal

Instituto Superior de Engenharia, Instituto Politcnico do Porto, Porto, Portugal

In the last 16 years great progress has been achieved in various fields which contributed to the present high accuracy (centimetre level) of satellite altimeter measurements in the open ocean. The main reasons for this achievement are: the high precision of the radial orbit position of the spacecraft; the development of models for all the geophysical corrections which need to be applied to the altimeter measurement, with particular emphasis to the ocean tides, sea state bias, ionospheric correction and wet tropospheric correction; the fact that most of the altimeter echoes over the ocean conform to the theoretical return from the ocean surface and can be described by the Brown model, which assumes a specular reflection of the ocean surface. In the coastal regions the altimeter data are degraded due to the following main reasons: the altimeter measurement itself is degraded due to land contamination, the waveforms fail to conform to the Brown model and need retracking; the wet tropospheric correction computed from the on board Microwave Radiometers (MWR) measurements becomes invalid due to the large footprint of the instrument and other effects; the global ocean tide models do not properly account for local tidal effects. This study addresses the problems related with the geophysical corrections in the coastal areas, with emphasis on the wet tropospheric correction. First, a summary of the major issues related with the global determination of the atmospheric path delay of the altimeter measurement due to water vapour will be presented. The correction for the tropospheric path-delay of the altimeter signal due to the wet component is one of the most difficult geophysical corrections to model. Although the absolute value does not reach values higher than 30-40 cm, it is highly variable. The magnitude of this correction is much smaller than the corresponding dry component, which is of the order of 2 m, but can be precisely modelled (1 cm) from meteorological models which assimilate temperature and pressure measurements. The wet component is much more difficult to model because of the high horizontal variability of humidity, and the complexity of the water cycle at all spatial and time scales, leading to variations of 10-20 cm. Although models for the wet path-delay are also derived from meteorological data, such as ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasting) and NCEP (National Centers for Environmental Prediction), the most accurate way to compute this correction is by using the data from dedicated Microwave Radiometers which have been incorporated in the most recent altimetry missions. However, in coastal areas various problems occur causing a degradation of the radiometer retrieval and making this correction unusable. Second, methodologies for improving the wet tropospheric correction in coastal regions are explained. Two main approaches will be focused. One approach consists in replacing, in the coastal regions, the radiometer-derived

correction by a model-derived correction such as ECMWF, dynamically linked to the closest points with valid radiometer-derived correction. This approach is simple, avoids discontinuities and can be implemented operationally to reprocess any satellite data set. Results of the global implementation of this methodology to the Geophysical Data Records (GDR) of various satellites will be presented. The second approach makes use of GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) derived path delays to derive the correction for the altimeter measurements in the coastal regions. In this context, results from experiments aiming the development of local corrections by using a network of IGS (International GNSS Service) and EPN (EUREF Permanent Network) stations augmented with local inland stations will be presented. The possibility of extending this approach to derive global corrections will be exploited.