Over the last decades, greenhouse gases and aerosol concentrations have been increasing in the atmosphere, disrupting the balance in the Earth system between incoming and outgoing radiation fluxes. Part of the outgoing longwave radiation being blocked, the system has reemitted less energy towards space than it has received from the Sun. This imbalance at the …
Since the 1970s, spatial imagery has allowed to witness dramatic changes in sea ice extension and distribution. However, the sea ice thickness (SIT), which is a fundamental variable to understand and predict sea ice dynamics, is still insufficiently observed. So far, the only possibility to observe the sea ice freeboard (the sea ice emerged part …
The ocean surface circulation with all its time-space complexity is the open-air limb of the oceanic mass transport. Surface currents carry heat (climate), plankton (marine biology), plastic (pollution). As well wave-current interactions lead to significant sea state variability and strong wave height gradients inside relatively small geographic zones. The complex behaviour of the coupled wave-current …
This project aims at developing, testing and implementing innovative methods able to use space geodetic data from altimetry and gravimetry to generate the regional ocean heat content (OHC) change over the Atlantic Ocean. The ESA MOHeaCAN project strategy has been pursued and refined at regional scales both for the data generation and the uncertainty estimate. In …
The ALBATROSS Project (ALtimetry for BAthymetry and Tide Retrievals for the Southern Ocean, Sea ice and ice Shelves) , led by NOVELTIS in collaboration with DTU, NPI and UCL, is one of the activities funded by ESA in the frame of the Polar Science Cluster, with the objective to foster collaborative research and interdisciplinary networking …
A seminal article on the progress of satellite altimetry and its future has been published on-line in Advances in Space Research on 23 March 2021. It is authored by the International Altimetry Team, which is composed of more than 360 co-authors. In 2018, in Ponta Delgada, the Azores, Portugal, celebrations took place for 25 years …
A new product from “altimetry-gravimetry”, developed within the MOHeaCAN project, is now available for download. It contains monthly time series (between August 2002 and June 2017) of several variables, the main ones being the regional Ocean Heat Content (OHC) (3°x3° spatial resolution grids), the global OHC and the Earth Energy Imbalance (EEI) indicator. Uncertainties are …
Lakes that form a seasonal ice cover are a major component of the terrestrial landscape. They cover approximately 2% of the Earth’s land surface, with the majority of them located in the Northern Hemisphere. The presence (or absence) of ice cover on lakes during the winter months affects both regional climate and weather events, such …
Accurate estimates of sea ice thickness are essential for numerical weather prediction, ice extent forecasts for navigability and to demonstrate the impacts of climate change on sea ice. The main source of uncertainty in sea ice thickness measurements from radar altimetry is due to snow. Scattering of the radar signal as it travels through snow …
Using CryoSat-2 interferometric synthetic aperture radar (SARIn) altimetry together with NASA’s operation IceBridge and IceSat-2 Lidar data in a multi-layer neural network (NN) in order to enhance CryoSat-2 SARIn swath measurements. Further investigation will be carried out into the use of these corrections to derive surface condition state and change. The European Space Agency (ESA), …
