2017 Images of the Month

Miami is very close to the sea, and at a very low altitude, so any above-normal sea level anomaly is threatening part of the city of flooding. Tide gauges, Doris and altimetry can combine to monitor and help mitigate impacts.

Jason-3 altimeter has a Digital Elevation Model tracking mode designed to overcome side reflections from steep-banked rivers

Doris has been monitoring plate tectonics motion since 1990; The system is part of the ITRF, and thus helps defining georeferencing on Earth.

Topex/Poseidon was launched 25 years ago: the starting point of a success story, still ongoing.

Currents can influence waves. With the coming of SWOT high-resolution data, it is important to better know this at small scales.

Waiting for Swot, knowledge of wetlands and flooded areas can be computed from the wealth of satellite observation already available, combining them in all possible ways. It will provide with validation data when Swot will be launched

Eddies are ubiquitous in the ocean. They can be tracked and followed day by day for nearly 25 years.

With more and more altimetry data available, high-precision computation of the Mean Sea Surface is giving more and more accurate reference surfaces.

When sea surface height is decreasing in Indonesia during an El Niño, the coral can be out of water longer than usual, thus leading to a higher coral mortality rate.

Lake Poyang is the biggest lake in China. It empties and fills with the monsoons, and depending on the years. Altimetry has been monitoring it for more than 20 years. Optical imagery gives another viewpoint to complement.

Altimetry helped to improve the tide models, including tidal currents. A buoy path can be seen oscillating in rythm with those.

Wave models give better results when taking icebergs (detected by altimetry) into account