TY  - JOUR
A1  - Dettmering, Denise
A1  - Schwatke, Christian
T1  - Ionospheric Corrections for Satellite Altimetry ‐ Impact on Global Mean Sea Level Trends
Y1  - 2022-04-25
VL  - 9
IS  - 4
JF  - Earth and Space Science
DO  - 10.1029/2021EA002098
PB  - 
N2  - Atmospheric delay corrections for satellite altimetry measurements are essential for deriving highly accurate sea surface heights and reliable global mean sea level (GMSL) trend estimates. A commonly used method to correct for ionospheric path delays are the usage of GNSS‐based Global Ionospheric Maps (GIM). The different orbit heights of GNSS and altimeter satellites require an adaption of GIM corrections to account for free electrons in the Earth plasmasphere. This study shows that the widely used scaling approach based on the International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) is not able to accurately scale the GIM models. The impact of neglecting the plasmaspheric part of the atmosphere strongly correlates with the solar activity of about 11 years. This manifests itself as trend errors in global GMSL. For the Jason period (2002–2021) a trend error of 0.17 mm/year can be shown, which is even larger for smaller periods (e.g., 1.0 mm/year for Jason‐1 lifetime). The application of an additional constant scaling factor of 0.886 can reduce the trend differences to below 0.05 mm/year.
N2  - Plain Language Summary: Global mean sea level (GMSL) rise is an important indicator for climate change. To precisely measure this quantity that is only in the order of about 3 mm/year, satellite altimeters are used. Their observations have to be corrected for influences in the Earth atmosphere. This study shows deficiencies in one commonly used correction data set. These corrections, based on observations from the Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are not accounting for the higher part of the atmosphere, the plasmasphere. Neglecting this influence derives systematic errors with a 11 years cycle that impacts the estimation of GMSL by up to 1 mm/year, depending on the period under investigation. It is recommended to apply an additional scaling of the available corrections in order to reduce the trend error to below 0.05 mm/year.
N2  - Key Points: Global Ionospheric Map corrections in altimetry Sensor Geophysical Data Records are not fully scaled to account for plasmaspheric electron content. Neglecting the plasmaspheric effect leads to trends of up to 1 mm/year in Global mean sea level estimates. The additional application of a scale factor improves the consistency in trend with respect to dual‐frequency satellite altimetry data.
UR  - http://resolver.sub.uni-goettingen.de/purl?gldocs-11858/9939
ER  -