Wet Tropospheric Correction in Satellite Altimetry
Summary
Satellite altimetry relies on precisely timed radar pulses to measure sea-surface height, a critical parameter for monitoring sea-level rise, ocean circulation and climate variability. As radar signals traverse the Earth’s atmosphere, they are delayed by water vapour and liquid water in the troposphere. This ‘wet path delay’ must be estimated and removed to achieve centimetre-level accuracy. Traditionally, on-board microwave radiometers infer atmospheric water content by measuring brightness temperatures at multiple microwave frequencies. Numerical weather models and reanalyses offer global fields of wet path delay but often lack fine coastal resolution or suffer biases under complex meteorological conditions. Recent developments have focused on cross-calibrating radiometers across satellite constellations, integrating ground-based observations from GNSS and coastal stations, and applying advanced objective analysis techniques to fuse disparate datasets. Accurate wet tropospheric correction underpins reliable sea-level anomaly estimates, supports coastal altimetry retrievals in land-contaminated zones and ensures consistency across multi-mission time series.
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Wet Tropospheric Correction in Satellite Altimetry publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in wet tropospheric correction in satellite altimetry across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Wet tropospheric correction: Adjustment applied to satellite radar range measurements to remove delays caused by atmospheric water vapour and liquid water.
Microwave radiometer (MWR): Instrument on altimetry satellites that measures microwave brightness temperature to infer integrated water vapour along the radar path.
Wet path delay (WPD): Time delay experienced by radar pulses when traversing the moist troposphere, proportional to the integrated water vapour content.
GNSS-derived Path Delay Plus (GPD+): Algorithm that combines ground-based GNSS water-vapour delays, MWR data and radiometer soundings through objective analysis to generate enhanced wet tropospheric corrections.
References
- On-Orbit Calibration Method for Correction Microwave Radiometer of the HY-2 Satellite Constellation. Remote Sensing (2023).
- A coastally improved global dataset of wet tropospheric corrections for satellite altimetry. Earth System Science Data (2020).
- GPD+ Wet Tropospheric Corrections for CryoSat-2 and GFO Altimetry Missions. Remote Sensing (2016).
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