The accurate knowledge of sea ice parameters, including sea ice thickness and snow depth over the sea ice cover, are key to both climate studies and data assimilation in operational forecasts. Large-scale active and passive remote sensing is the basis for the estimation of these parameters. In traditional altimetry or the retrieval of snow depth with passive microwave sensing, although the sea ...

Measuring sea level change and understanding its causes has considerably improved in the recent years, essentially because new in situ and remote sensing observations have become available. Here we report on most recent results on contemporary sea level rise. We first present sea level observations from tide gauges over the twentieth century and from satellite altimetry since the early 1990s. W...

We report on numerical experiments to test the sensitivity of Lagrangian coherent structures (LCSs), found by identifying ridges of the finite-time Lyapunov exponent (FTLE), to errors in two systems representing the California Current System (CCS). First, we consider a synthetic mesoscale eddy field generated from Fourier filtering satellite altimetry observations of the CCS. Second, we conside...

[1] Abyssal hills, which are pervasive landforms on the seafloor of the Earth’s oceans, represent a potential tectonic record of the history of mid‐ocean ridge spreading. However, the most detailed global maps of the seafloor, derived from the satellite altimetry‐based gravity field, cannot be used to deterministically characterize such small‐scale (<10 km) morphology. Nevertheless, the small‐s...

[1] Late-summer thickness distributions of large ice floes in the Transpolar Drift between Svalbard and the North Pole in 1991, 1996, 1998, and 2001 are compared. They have been derived from drilling and electromagnetic (EM) sounding. Results show a strong interannual variability, with significantly reduced thickness in 1998 and 2001. The mean thickness decreased by 22.5% from 3.11 m in 1991 to...

(e.g., Smith, 1998; Goff and Smith, 2003) and will be shown here, geological information is contained in the small-scale fabric of altimetric gravity data. This fabric, which has the appearance of the skin of an orange peel, or the surface of a football, exists everywhere in the altimetry data, filling the otherwise uninteresting reaches between larger-scaled, recognizable features such as mid-...