Open water areas surrounded by sea ice significantly influence the ocean-ice-atmosphere interaction and contribute to Arctic climate change. Satellite altimetry can detect these ice openings and enables one to estimate sea surface heights and further altimetry data derived products. This study introduces an innovative, unsupervised classification approach for detecting open water areas in the G...

Local sea-level changes differ significantly from global-mean sea-level change as a result of (1) non-climatic, geological background processes; (2) atmosphere/ocean dynamics; and (3) the gravitational, elastic, and rotational “fingerprint” effects of ice and ocean mass redistribution. Though the research communities working on these different effects each have a long history, the integration o...

Sea level determination via satellite altimetry is subject to numerous error sources. One of these is the sea state bias where changing surface wave conditions alter an altimeter’s estimate of mean sea level. Recent work suggests that present day methods for correcting this bias, based solely on wave and wind information from the altimeter, may be improved if additional surface gravity wave fie...

Reliable projections of future sea level are vital for coastal communities. Regional deviations from global mean sea level rise are caused primarily by spatial patterns in the various components of sea level change (e.g. melting land ice, thermal expansion, and so on; see Slangen et al. 2012; Perrette et al. 2013; Church et al. 2013) and by wind anomalies associated for example with various cli...

The across-shelf structures of the ocean circulation and the associated sea surface height (SSH) variability are examined on the west Florida shelf (WFS) for the 3-yr interval from September 1998 to December 2001. Five sets of characteristic circulation patterns are extracted from 2-day, low-pass-filtered data using the self-organizing map: extreme upwelling and downwelling structures with stro...

monitoring of water levels within the seas and oceans has been enhanced by application of satellite radar altimetry missions, compared to the traditional in-situ tide gauge measurements, due to their vast coverage and better spatial resolution. satellite radar altimetry, which is originally designed to measure global ocean surface height, has been applied to inland surface water hydrologic stud...

Alaskan glaciers are among the largest regional contributors to sea-level rise in the latter half of the 20th century. Earlier studies have documented extensive and accelerated ice wastage in most regions of Alaska. Here we study five decades of mass loss on high-elevation, land-terminating glaciers of the Wrangell Mountains ( 4900 km) in central Alaska based on airborne center-line laser altim...