Location
Utah State University
Start Date
5-11-2011 1:15 PM
Description
The gravitational influence of the Moon and Sun have a well-known influence on the Earth’s ocean levels: tides. Radar altimeters make precise measurements of the height of the instrument above ground. With a known altimeter orbit and measured altitude, the height of the ocean tide can be measured to centimetric scales. Accounting for the tidal forces from celestial objects is an important step in finding the residual sea level height. In this paper radar altimeter data from Jason-2 is used to estimate the magnitude and phase of eight dominant tidal constituents over six study regions. Each constituent is estimated by fitting the data to a Fourier series to estimate tidal magnitue and phase. Accounting for the tidal components selected for this paper largely models the tides, but some residual variance remains. This is attributed to an incomplete tidal model and to measurement and model error.
Fitting Tidal Constituents to Altimeter Data
Utah State University
The gravitational influence of the Moon and Sun have a well-known influence on the Earth’s ocean levels: tides. Radar altimeters make precise measurements of the height of the instrument above ground. With a known altimeter orbit and measured altitude, the height of the ocean tide can be measured to centimetric scales. Accounting for the tidal forces from celestial objects is an important step in finding the residual sea level height. In this paper radar altimeter data from Jason-2 is used to estimate the magnitude and phase of eight dominant tidal constituents over six study regions. Each constituent is estimated by fitting the data to a Fourier series to estimate tidal magnitue and phase. Accounting for the tidal components selected for this paper largely models the tides, but some residual variance remains. This is attributed to an incomplete tidal model and to measurement and model error.