2012 Images of the Month

India has a climate much influenced by the ocean. The knowledge of currents is thus of foremost importance for the whole country. Using the full twenty-years time series of altimeter data enables to correlate winds and currents with a great confidence.

The merging of multiple altimeter missions improves the resolution of altimetry-derived maps. However, in some regions like the Mediterranean, even more processing, and inclusion of other kind of data are needed to reach enough resolution.

In 20 years since Topex/Poseidon launch, altimetry has grown, and is still growing, in the number of uses as well as users

The way that currents' main fronts shift is one of the information brought by multi-year datasets. With now nearly 20 years of altimetry, such shifts begin to emerge and be more and more studied, correlated with other variations, either (or both) in the ocean or the atmosphere.

Antarctica glaciers are moving and react differently depending on the geographical area. In West Antarctica, glaciers are thinning, losing up to several meters a year and this thinning is accelerating. In East Antarctica, some glaciers are losing thickness, but without any observable acceleration.

Jellyfish are carried by ocean currents. Altimetry enables to describe those and, with coastal processing, to help forecast jellyfish strandings on the Mediterranean beaches.

The highest significant wave height ever measured by an altimeter was in the North Atlantic during the Quirin storm. Comparison with other source of data corroborate the altimetric estimates, even if those are higher than the values usually considered as valid.

Kuroshio is one of the major currents. With 20 years of continuous data, altimetry enable to catch year-to-year variation in the path of a current, and to better understand its mechanisms. Understanding, monitoring and forecasting its changing path is important for climate predictions

Comparison of altimetry data with in situ measurements in the north polar seas demonstrates that altimetry products can be used to study oceanic variability in the region.

March 2011 tsunami that hit Japan rejected a huge quantity of debris in the Pacific. Monitoring and forecasting those, using in particular altimetry, is becoming vital.