Sea-surface geostrophic velocities for the Kuroshio region calculated from TOPEX/ POSEIDON altimetry data together with in situ oceanographic data are compared with surface velocities derived from drifting buoy trajectories. The geostrophic velocities agree well with the observed velocities, suggesting that the Kuroshio surface layer is essentially in geostrophic balance, within measurement err...

Observations of sea surface height reveal that substantial changes have occurred over the past decade in the mid- to high-latitude North Atlantic Ocean. TOPEX/Poseidon altimeter data show that subpolar sea surface height increased during the 1990s, and the geostrophic velocity derived from altimeter data exhibits declining subpolar gyre circulation. Combining the data from earlier satellites, w...

A completely geometric approach for precise orbit determination (POD) of low earth orbiter (LEO) spacecraft has been devised by the authors which does not use dynamic models, but only data from the GPS receiver onboard the LEO and the International GPS Service (IGS) precise GPS ephemeris product. The strategy relies on combining the time-continuous measurement strength of the pseudorange and ca...

[1] Surface transports into the California Current are calculated from TOPEX/POSEIDON altimeter surface height slopes during the 9.5 year period from October 1992–May 2002. These quantify the anomalous onshore and southward displacements of the water column during the 2000–2002 period, which had been hypothesized by others based on anomalous water properties observed in mid-2002 off Oregon. Ano...