Originally designed for applications over the ocean, satellite altimetry has been proven to be a useful tool for hydrologic studies. Altimeter products, mainly conceived for oceanographic studies, often fail to provide atmospheric corrections suitable for inland water studies. The focus of this paper is the analysis of the main issues related with the atmospheric corrections that need to be applied to the altimeter range to get precise water level heights. Using the corrections provided on the Radar Altimeter Database System, the main errors present in the dry and wet tropospheric corrections and in the ionospheric correction of the various satellites are reported. It has been shown that the model-based tropospheric corrections are not modeled properly and in a consistent way in the various altimetric products. While over the ocean, the dry tropospheric correction (DTC) is one of the most precise range corrections, in some of the present altimeter products, it is the correction with the largest errors over continental water regions, causing large biases of several decimeters, and along-track interpolation errors up to several centimeters, both with small temporal variations. The wet tropospheric correction (WTC) from the on-board microwave radiometers is hampered by the contamination on the radiometer measurements of the surrounding lands, making it usable only in the central parts of large lakes. In addition, the WTC from atmospheric models may also have large errors when it is provided at sea level instead of surface height. These errors cannot be corrected by the user, since no accurate expression exists for the height variation of the WTC. Alternative and accurate corrections can be computed from in situ data, e.g., DTC from surface pressure at barometric stations and WTC from Global Navigation Satellite System permanent stations. The latter approach is particularly favorable for small lakes and reservoirs, where GNSS-derived WTC at a single location can be representative of the whole lake. For non-timely critical studies, for consistency and stability, model-derived tropospheric corrections from European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Re-Analysis ERA Interim, properly computed at surface height, are recommended. The instrument-based dual-frequency ionospheric correction may have errors related with the land contamination in the Ku and C/S bands, making it more suitable to use a model-based correction. The most suitable model-based ionospheric correction is the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) global ionosphere map (GIM) model, available after 1998, properly scaled to the altimeter height. Most altimeter products provide the GIM correction unreduced for the total electron content extending above the altitude of these satellites, thus overestimating the ionospheric correction by about 8%. Prior to 1998, the NIC09 (NOAA Ionosphere Climatology 2009) climatology provides the best accuracy.

The wet tropospheric correction (WTC) is still a significant error source in most altimetric products. For studies such as sea level change, as those performed in the scope of the ESA Sea Level Climate Change Initiative (SL_cci) project, the use of uniform and consistent WTC datasets are of major importance. For this purpose, a set of improved WTC, using the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) derived Path Delay (GPD) algorithm, was envisaged for the main six altimetric missions: the so-called reference missions (TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason-1 and Jason-2) and the three ESA missions (ERS-1, ERS-2 and Envisat).The GPD methodology is based on the combination of wet path delays derived from zenith total delays calculated at a network of coastal GNSS stations and valid microwave radiometer (MWR) measurements at altimeter nearby points. At each altimeter point with an invalid MWR value, the WTC is estimated from the set of observations, along with the associated mapping error, using a linear space-time objective analysis technique that takes into account the spatial and temporal variability of the WTC field and the accuracy of each data set used. In the absence of observations, tropospheric delays from the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) ReAnalysis (ERA) Interim model are adopted.Originally designed to improve the WTC in the coastal zone, the GPD evolved to include the global ocean, correcting for land and ice contamination in the MWR footprint, or spurious measurements due to e.g. instrument malfunction.This paper presents an overview of the GPD implementation for the afore-mentioned six altimetric missions.The GPD products have been validated by comparison with the WTC adopted as the reference correction by the Archiving, Validation, and Interpretation of Satellite Data in Oceanography (AVISO): the so-called composite correction (Comp) for all missions except Jason-2, for which the version D of the Geophysical Data Records (GDR-D) Advanced Microwave Radiometer (AMR) WTC is adopted. Various sea level anomaly (SLA) statistical analyses have been performed and are summarised in this paper: differences in SLA variance calculated along satellite tracks and at crossovers; SLA variance difference function of distance from the coast or function of latitude.Results show that the GPD WTC evidence a very significant improvement with respect to the Comp correction, particularly at polar and coastal regions, for all ESA and TOPEX/Poseidon missions. For the last, the impact is particularly significant in the second part of the mission, since detected anomalies present in the TOPEX Microwave Radiometer products are corrected by the algorithm. For Jason-1 and Jason-2, some improvements are observed in the coastal regions, although globally not very significant, particularly for Jason-2. This is attributed to the good performance of the WTC present in the most recent Jason-1 and Jason-2 products.The GPD WTC constitutes a coherent dataset of global and continuous corrections, for most missions a major improvement with respect to the baseline MWR and the Comp wet tropospheric corrections

Due to its large space-time variability, the wet tropospheric correction (WTC) is still considered a significant error source in satellite altimetry. This paper presents the GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite Systems) derived Path Delay Plus (GPD+), the most recent algorithm developed at the University of Porto to retrieve improved WTC for radar altimeter missions. The GPD+ are WTC estimated by space-time objective analysis, by combining all available observations in the vicinity of the point: valid measurements from the on-board microwave radiometer (MWR), from GNSS coastal and island stations and from scanning imaging MWR on board various remote sensing missions. The GPD+ corrections are available both for missions which do not possess an on-board microwave radiometer such as CryoSat-2 (CS-2) and for all missions which carry this sensor, by addressing the various error sources inherent to the MWR-derived WTC. To ensure long-term stability of the corrections, the large set of radiometers used in this study have been calibrated with respect to the Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM/I) and the SSM/I Sounder (SSM/IS). The application of the algorithm to CS-2 and Geosat Follow-on (GFO), as representative altimetric missions without and with a MWR aboard the respective spacecraft, is described. Results show that, for both missions, the new WTC significantly reduces the sea level anomaly (SLA) variance with respect to the model-based corrections. For GFO, the new WTC also leads to a large reduction in SLA variance with respect to the MWR-derived WTC, recovering a large number of observations in the coastal and polar regions and full sets of tracks and several cycles when MWR measurements are missing or invalid. Overall, the algorithm allows the recovery of a significant number of measurements, ensuring the continuity and consistency of the correction in the open-ocean/coastal transition zone and at high latitudes.

The focus of this study is the assessment of the main range and geophysical corrections needed to derive accurate sea level time series from satellite altimetry in the Indonesia seas, the ultimate aim being the determination of sea level trend for this region. Due to its island nature, this is an area of large complexity for altimetric studies, a true laboratory for coastal altimetry. For this reason, the selection of the best corrections for sea level anomaly estimation from satellite altimetry is of particular relevance in the Indonesian seas. The same happens with the mean sea surface adopted in the sea level anomaly computation due to the large gradients of the mean sea surface in this part of the ocean. This study has been performed using altimetric data from the three reference missions, TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason-1 and Jason-2, extracted from the Radar Altimeter Database System. Analyses of sea level anomaly variance differences, function of distance from the coast and at altimeter crossovers were used to assess the quality of the various corrections and mean sea surface models. The selected set of corrections and mean sea surface have been used to estimate the sea level anomaly time series. The rate of sea level rise for the Indonesian seas was found to be 4.2 ± 0.2 mm/year over the 23-year period (1993–2015).