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Bottom pressure tides along a line in the southeast Atlantic Ocean and comparisons with satellite altimetry

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Abstract

Seafloor pressure records, collected at 11 stations aligned along a single ground track of the Topex/Poseidon and Jason satellites, are analyzed for their tidal content. With very low background noise levels and approximately 27 months of high-quality records, tidal constituents can be estimated with unusually high precision. This includes many high-frequency lines up through the seventh-diurnal band. The station deployment provides a unique opportunity to compare with tides estimated from satellite altimetry, point by point along the satellite track, in a region of moderately high mesoscale variability. That variability can significantly corrupt altimeter-based tide estimates, even with 17 years of data. A method to improve the along-track altimeter estimates by correcting the data for non-tidal variability is found to yield much better agreement with the bottom-pressure data. The technique should prove useful in certain demanding applications, such as altimetric studies of internal tides.

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Acknowledgements

Brian Beckley is thanked for his help in processing Topex/Poseidon and Jason-1 altimeter data. Those data were obtained as Geophysical Data Records from PODAAC, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena. The altimeter-based sea-level anomaly grids used here as a correction were produced by SSALTO/DUACS and distributed by AVISO with support from CNES. This work was supported by the Ocean Surface Topography program of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration and by grant OCE-0099177 from the National Science Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA

    Richard D. Ray

  2. School of Marine Sciences, University of Maine, Orono, ME, USA

    Deirdre A. Byrne

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  1. Richard D. Ray
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  2. Deirdre A. Byrne
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Correspondence to Richard D. Ray.

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Responsible Editor: Dirk Olbers

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Ray, R.D., Byrne, D.A. Bottom pressure tides along a line in the southeast Atlantic Ocean and comparisons with satellite altimetry. Ocean Dynamics 60, 1167–1176 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-010-0316-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-010-0316-0

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