Welcome to the NASA ACCESS-sponsored Web-based Altimetry Service
Altimeter measurements consist of many components in order to arrive at the desired Sea Surface Height (SSH), SSH Anomaly (SSHA, difference of current measurement from a long term Mean Sea Surface (MSS)), or Ocean Surface Topography (difference of SSH from the geoid). The Altimetry Service is designed to allow users to select various components for updating on selected time periods or regions of data.
Another feature of the service that will be developed will allow component providers to register new data sets for others to use. This will speed the dissemination of the latest data to the broad community. Until the web-based feature is implemented, please communicate with Principal Investigator
( Philip.s.callahan@jpl.nasa.gov, telephone: +1-818-354-4753)
about having your component added to the service.
Web-based Altimeter Service Data
The current base data set for the service is TOPEX GDRs with Retracking (RGDRs)
in netCDF format. This data set consists of TOPEX Merged GDRs as available from
PODAAC with a data sections for Retracking done by ?? and TMR correction done
by Shannon Brown for the Ocean Surface Topography Science Team (see
presentation in
Documentation
area,
OSTST09tpx-retrk-psc1.096.pdf
). The precision orbit and elastic ocean tide have been updated from original
GDR values. Details are given in the
Documentation
area in
retrk-gdr-data-rec-r30.096.doc.pdf
and
retrk-gdr-data-rec-r30.096.xls.pdf.
The xls document gives an element-by-element
data description.
Since the data are now in netCDF it will soon be possible to select a limited
set of data elements for downloading.
Note that the Retracking results have not been fully validated and so should be
used with caution (see pp 17-19 of
OSTST09summary-instrument-proc-psc1.pdf
).
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