Comparisons of sea surface heights from satellite altimetry and in-situ pressure-recording inverted echo sounders in the northwestern Pacific

초록

Satellite altimetry has provided an unprecedented long-term observational dataset to characterize how sea level and sea state variabilities have changed. Nevertheless, quantitative comparisons between satellite and in situ sea surface height (SSH) measurements in the open ocean are few due to lack of simultaneous observations of both steric and mass-loading components. In this study, we compare satellite-measured along-track and gridded SSH anomaly products from AVISO with in situ SSH anomaly measurements from arrays of pressure-recording inverted echo sounders (PIESs) deployed around the northwestern Pacific Ocean. Round-trip acoustic travel time from the bottom to the sea surface and bottom pressure measurements from PIES were converted to steric and mass-loading contributions to the SSH variability. Comparisons of the two SSHs show somewhat different features depending on regions. They show a good agreement in the Kuroshio Extension, while erroneous hump signals reduce their cross relationship in the North Equatorial Current Region. We will show several sets of comparison results to verify the AVISO satellite altimeter products in the northwestern Pacific Ocean.