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Revisiting the pole tide for and from satellite altimetry

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Abstract

Satellite altimeter sea surface height observations include the geocentric displacements caused by the pole tide, namely the response of the solid Earth and oceans to polar motion. Most users of these data remove these effects using a model that was developed more than 20 years ago. We describe two improvements to the pole tide model for satellite altimeter measurements. Firstly, we recommend an approach that improves the model for the response of the oceans by including the effects of self-gravitation, loading, and mass conservation. Our recommended approach also specifically includes the previously ignored displacement of the solid Earth due to the load of the ocean response, and includes the effects of geocenter motion. Altogether, this improvement amplifies the modeled geocentric pole tide by 15 %, or up to 2 mm of sea surface height displacement. We validate this improvement using two decades of satellite altimeter measurements. Secondly, we recommend that the altimetry pole tide model exclude geocentric sea surface displacements resulting from the long-term drift in polar motion. The response to this particular component of polar motion requires a more rigorous approach than is used by conventional models. We show that erroneously including the response to this component of polar motion in the pole tide model impacts interpretation of regional sea level rise by \(\pm \)0.25 mm/year.

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Acknowledgments

SDD performed the work described in this paper at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Work at the University of Colorado was partially supported by NASA GRACE funding, and by NASA’s ‘Making Earth Science Data Records for Use in Research Environments (MEaSUREs) Program. We thank G. Egbert and S. Erofeeva for providing the TPXO8 ocean tide model. The IERS is acknowledged for providing the EOPC04 polar motion time series. We thank two anonymous reviewers for their useful feedback.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, M/S 238-600, Pasadena, CA, 91109, USA

    Shailen Desai

  2. Department of Physics and Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, 80309, USA

    John Wahr

  3. SGT, Inc., Greenbelt, MD, USA

    Brian Beckley

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  1. Shailen Desai
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  2. John Wahr
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Correspondence to Shailen Desai.

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Desai, S., Wahr, J. & Beckley, B. Revisiting the pole tide for and from satellite altimetry. J Geod 89, 1233–1243 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-015-0848-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-015-0848-7

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