Topic 3b - Oceans: applications

Satellite altimetry absolutely revolutionised the way that we viewed the ocean currents in the
surface of the ocean. Before that, we had to go out and measure ocean currents using ships,
using hydrographic measurements. You can only take those measurements relatively slowly,
so, for example, to measure the ocean currents within a few degrees square in the North
Atlantic, will take you at least a few days. You get very, very accurate measurements, and you
also get a depth profile of the measurements, but it's only a single snapshot and a snapshot
that's taken you some time to get.

With satellite altimetry, we can cover the entire globe within a few days. The TOPEX Poseidon
mission took about 10 days to cover the ocean surface, and it's following successors, Jason 1,
Jason 2. The ERS-1, ERS-2, and Envisat missions from ESA had a different orbit. They take 35
days to cover the ocean, but it's a denser pattern, so we get a better spatial resolution from
that.

Now that's simply something that's simply not possible by using ships, or you can put buoys
out into the ocean, but it'd take a lot of buoys to be able to cover the global ocean. And we
get that repeat. We can take those measurements every 10 days, every 35 days. We get the
same set of measurements, the same type of measurement. So we don't just get a single
snapshot. We get the time series of what we're looking at.

It's only the surface, so we still need the ships and the buoys to go and find out what's
happening below the surface, but we can monitor the surface of the ocean very accurately
and determine the currents and what's happening to them over time from remote sensing,
which we simply can't do any other way.

When we first started doing this back in the early days of ERS-1 and the TOPEX mission, we
found that there's a lot more variability in the ocean currents, in the surface ocean currents,
than we've ever thought. And there are things called mesoscale eddies, effectively little
rotations like little storms in the surface of the ocean. And they're everywhere. We find them
all over the place. And we can now see them and match them with the imagery that we have
from sea surface temperature. And we can, from the temperature, we can see what's
happening to the ocean surface temperature.

Then we can look at the ocean currents from the altimetry and see how quickly these things
are rotating, how quickly they're moving around the ocean. So we can start to merge the
different remote sensing techniques to give us much more information about the scale of
these eddies, how they change and evolve over time.

To be able to separate out those mean ocean currents, we need another way of measuring the
geoid. We need another way to get to the shape of the geoid. Until very recently, we didn't
have any way of doing that. So ESA launched their revolutionary GOCE mission, and GOCE is
the Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer.

And it was specifically to try and address this problem to separate out the signal from the
geoid and the signal from the ocean circulation. And the way that it works is incredibly clever
technology. At the height of the satellite, it measures very, very small changes in the gravity
field as it flies around the Earth.

Now the further away that you get from the Earth, the more smeared out that gravity signal
becomes. So to be able to find out about sea mounts, about very small changes in ocean
ridges, you actually need to get quite close to the Earth. And GOCE flew in an incredibly low
Earth orbit, much lower than anything else that we have, which meant that they had to build
a satellite that was actually going through the top of the atmosphere, which meant that it
was more like a very sleek aircraft than it was a typical satellite. And it was a very different
technology. They were really pushing the bounds of what they could measure with the GOCE
satellite.

Over the mission lifetime, it was able to measure something like 50 million separate
measurements of this difference in gravity. From the data that we've got from the GOCE
mission, we've managed to put together a much more complete view of the Earth's geoid than
we've been able to get before from anything other than satellite altimetry. So we now have an
independent data set that we can use in conjunction with the altimetry to tell us about the
large scale circulation, which we've not been able to do before.

So in essence, it's a simple subtraction. We have to take the altimetry, and we take off the
geoid field. In practise, it's a little more complicated than that, because there are still small
scale features, very small sea mounts, very steep slopes in the geoid field that even GOCE
couldn't quite manage to resolve. And so ESA funded a GOCE user toolbox, which actually
allows oceanographers who weren't used to dealing with these kind of gravity-based data, to
merge those GOCE data with the data that we get from the altimetry to produce these nice
merged fields of ocean circulation. That's what the oceanographic community expects. That's
the kind of information that they understand. So part of what we need to do is to produce not
just the data from the missions, but also the tools that allow people to generate their own
sources of data that they can then understand and interpret in terms of the science.

GOCE was one of ESA's Earth Explorer missions, these missions specifically designed to try
and measure things and use techniques that haven't been used before. So GOCE was using
incredibly delicate accelerometers to measure changes in the gravity failed. The other ESA
Explorer missions are the CryoSat-2 mission, which is a satellite altimeter, but it uses a
different technique to be able to determine the shape of the surface and was specifically
designed to measure the height of ice, so for measuring ice caps and sea ice. So we can look
and see how those surfaces are changing over time.

The other mission is SMOS, S-MOS, the Soil, Moisture, and Ocean Salinity mission, which using
a very novel technique of synthetic apertures to make it look like they have a very small
footprint on the ground to measure ocean salinity. It's the first time that we've tried to
measure ocean salinity from space. The measurements at the moment are nothing like the
accuracy that we can get from shipboard measurements, but we get them everywhere.

We get global measurements, and we get repeat measurements. We start to get time series.
So it gives a huge increase in the amount of information that we've got, and we're seeing
some fascinating things in terms of the shape of the Amazon plume as the freshwater comes
into the Atlantic. That's just one example of the results that are coming out of the mission
already.

The new missions require new data products. All of these data products have to be assessed
in terms of their accuracy, their validity. Are they really giving us true information about the
geophysical state of the ocean? And there's a lot of work that goes into the calibration and
validation of those data and of the products themselves to make sure that they're fit for
purpose. And from a lot of the ESA missions and from other people's missions, some of the
data that we use now actually came out as byproducts of the original plan for the mission.
CryoSat is an example. The mission was designed to measure primarily over ice, hence the
"cryo" in CryoSat. But we've now found that we can use the data that are coming from
CryoSat when it was operational over the ocean to give us more information about the state
of the ocean. And in particular, it allows us to take the measurements much closer to the
coast than we could manage with a traditional satellite altimeter.

So we're starting to get much more information coming up close to the coast. And ESA, the
Earth Explorer missions, are ideas. They're concepts that ESA show can work, that may then
develop into future missions that may become operational. So this process of taking the
missions, taking the concepts from the explorers, the new ideas, through to giving those time
series is absolutely essential when it comes to understanding our climate, because it gives us
the opportunity to be able to monitor how things are changing over time using very consistent
measurements that we have globally at high resolution, and we have continuity between
those different missions.