A Broadband View of the Sea Surface Height Wavenumber Spectrum
Abstract
Airborne lidar altimetry can measure the sea surface height (SSH) over scales ranging from hundreds of kilometers to a few meters. Here, we analyze the spectrum of SSH observations collected during an airborne lidar campaign conducted off the California coast. We show that the variance in the surface wave band can be over 20 times larger than the variance at submesoscales and that the observed SSH variability is sensitive to the directionality of surface waves. Our results support the hypothesis that there is a spectral gap between meso-to-submesoscale motions and small-scale surface waves and also indicate that aliasing of surface waves into lower wavenumbers may complicate the interpretation of SSH spectra. These results highlight the importance of better understanding the contributions of different physics to the SSH variability and considering the SSH spectrum as a continuum in the context of future satellite altimetry missions.
Additional Information
© 2022 The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. Issue Online: 16 February 2022. Version of Record online: 16 February 2022. Accepted manuscript online: 03 February 2022. Manuscript accepted: 31 January 2022. Manuscript revised: 25 January 2022. Manuscript received: 22 October 2021. A. B. Villas Bôas, S. T. Gille, B. D. Cornuelle, and M. R. Mazloff were funded by NASA award 80NSSC20K1136 through the SWOT program. A. B. Villas Bôas had additional funding from NASA award 80NSSC19K1004 through the S-MODE program. L. Lenain was funded through NASA JPL contract 1618801. The authors thank Nick Statom for collecting and preprocessing the data. Data Availability Statement. The data used for this study are available through the UC San Diego Library Digital Collections at https://doi.org/10.6075/J0W0963R and it has been published as Villas Bôas et al. (2022). The source code used to produce the results from this paper is published as Villas Bôas (2022) and can be accessed in the following GitHub repository https://github.com/biavillasboas/BroadbandSpectrum as well as at https://www.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5866771.Attached Files
Supplemental Material - 2021gl096699-sup-0001-supporting_information_si-s01.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 114141
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20220404-121450000
- 80NSSC20K1136
- NASA
- 80NSSC19K1004
- NASA
- 1618801
- JPL
- Created
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2022-04-04Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2023-10-23Created from EPrint's last_modified field