The DTU21 global mean sea surface and first evaluation

Abstract

A new mean sea surface (MSS) from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) called DTU21MSS for referencing sea-level anomalies from satellite altimetry is introduced in this paper, and a suite of evaluations are performed. One of the reasons for updating the existing mean sea surface is the fact that during the last 6 years, nearly 3 times as many data have been made available by space agencies, resulting in more than 15 years of altimetry from long-repeat orbits (LROs) or geodetic missions. This includes the two interleaved long-repeat cycles of Jason-2 with a systematic cross-track distance as low as 4 km. A new processing chain with updated filtering and editing has been implemented for the DTU21MSS. This way, the DTU21MSS has been computed from 2 Hz altimetry in contrast to the former DTU15MSS and DTU18MSS which were computed from 1 Hz altimetry. The new DTU21MSS is computed over the same 20-year averaging time from 1 January 1993 to 31 December 2012 with a well-specified central time of 1 January 2003 and is available from https://doi.org/10.11583/DTU.19383221.v1 (Andersen, 2022). Cryosat-2 employs synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and SAR interferometric (SARin) modes in a large part of the Arctic Ocean due to the presence of sea ice. For SAR- and SARin-mode data we applied the SAMOSA+ physical retracking to make it compatible with the physical retracker used for conventional low-resolution-mode data in other parts of the ocean.