Sea State Bias in Radar Altimetry Revisited

Abstract

Sea state bias (SSB) is calculated anew for each radar altimeter. The input data are sea surface height (h) differences, separated in time by at most one repeat cycle, or the difference between measured h and a time-mean sea surface, an approach called here “differences from the mean” (DFM). In order to release data to users soon, early estimates of SSB are computed from short time series. This work has three objectives: 1) show that the DFM approach introduces spurious values in the estimated SSB, 2) quantify the SSB error caused by short time series, and 3) estimate SSB for OSTM.