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Analysis of vertical deflections determined from one cycle of simulated SWOT wide-swath altimeter data

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Abstract

The marine gravity field model is mainly derived from nadir satellite altimetry measurements. However, the accuracy of the east component of the vertical deflection is significantly lower than that of the north component in most areas due to the orbital inclination of altimetry satellites. As a novel altimetry technique, wide-swath altimeters are expected to simultaneously obtain high-precision and high-resolution two-dimensional sea surface height measurements and hence to improve the accuracy and resolution of the recovered marine gravity field model. Here, taking the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) wide-swath altimeter mission as an example, based on the proposed nadir ground tracks and swath width, one cycle of SWOT sea surface height measurements is simulated and compared with one year of the simulated sea surface height measurements from the nadir altimeter missions of Jason-1/GM (Geodetic Mission), Cryosat-2/LRM (Low Rate Mode) and SARAL/GM. Then, the vertical deflections are determined in the South China Sea and part of the Indian Ocean. Compared with the EGM2008 gravity field model, the vertical deflections determined by one cycle of SWOT data are better than the results determined by the combined dataset of Jason-1/GM, Cryosat-2/LRM and SARAL/GM data and can significantly improve the accuracy of east vertical deflection. It is determined that the SWOT random and systematic errors have certain effects on the accuracy of the vertical deflection, but these can be reduced by filtering. In addition, under the premise of the expected accuracy and spatial resolution of the SWOT mission, vertical deflections with grid spacing smaller than 1 arcmin and comparable accuracy could be derived.

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Data availability

The proposed coordinates of SWOT nadir ground tracks are provided by AVISO (https://www.aviso.altimetry.fr/missions/future-missions/swot/orbit.html). The MSS_CNES_CLS15 and MDT_CNES_CLS18 are released by AVISO (https://www.aviso.altimetry.fr/en/data/products/auxiliary-products.html). The daily SLA products are released by European Copernicus Program (https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/satellite-sea-level-global?tab=overview).

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Acknowledgements

We thank the OceanDataLab for providing the SWOT simulator which is available at https://github.com/SWOTsimulator/swotsimulator. This study is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 41974020, 41721003 and 42192533, the Special Fund of Hubei Luojia Laboratory and Foundation of Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology under Grant SAST2020-035.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. MOE Key Laboratory of Geospace Environment and Geodesy, School of Geodesy and Geomatics, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

    Taoyong Jin, Mao Zhou & Jiancheng Li

  2. Hubei Luojia Laboratory, Wuhan, China

    Taoyong Jin, Jiancheng Li & Weiping Jiang

  3. Beijing Institute of Spacecraft System Engineering, Beijing, China

    Huan Zhang

  4. GNSS Research Center, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

    Weiping Jiang

  5. School of Resources and Civil Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China

    Shengjun Zhang

  6. Institute of Seismology, China Earthquake Administration, Wuhan, China

    Minzhang Hu

Authors
  1. Taoyong Jin
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  2. Mao Zhou
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  3. Huan Zhang
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  4. Jiancheng Li
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Contributions

TJ and HZ jointly designed the research; TJ and MZ performed the research and wrote the manuscript; MZ, SZ and MH analyzed the data and results; JL and WJ provided supervision and many useful suggestions.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Taoyong Jin or Huan Zhang.

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Jin, T., Zhou, M., Zhang, H. et al. Analysis of vertical deflections determined from one cycle of simulated SWOT wide-swath altimeter data. J Geod 96, 30 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-022-01619-8

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