Coastal gravity anomalies from retracked Geosat/GM altimetry: Improvement, limitation and the role of airborne gravity data

Abstract

We process geophysical and waveform data records of the Geosat/GM (geodetic mission) satellite altimeter mission for waveform retracking and applications. An improved threshold retracker is developed. The performances of the Beta-5, threshold and improved threshold retrackers are assessed over waters around Taiwan. The improved threshold retracker outperforms the other two. The improvement in the accuracy of sea surface height (SSH) is investigated according to marine zone and the distance of waters to the shore. The improvement rate increases closer to the land, with the largest improvement rate of about 20% in waters within 10 km of the shore. Over waters around islands and coasts, there are still retracked SSHs with large errors. Least-squares collocation is used to compute gravity anomalies from the Geosat/GM altimeter data. Use of retracked SSHs improves the accuracy of gravity anomalies by about 11%. Adding airborne gravity data further improves the accuracy, especially in the immediate vicinity of the coasts. Tide model errors over coastal waters remain a problem in altimetry applications, even if the waveforms are properly retracked.