Knowledge of the overall error budget and accuracy of a Mean Dynamic Topography and subsequently derived Geostrophic Velocities is important information for ocean studies. Following the basic equation MDT = MSS - N with the Mean Dynamic Topography (MDT), the Mean Sea Surface (MSS) and the Geoid Height (N), one can clearly see that the MDT is composed of two entities derived from different measurement types and hence different error budgets. They can be considered as uncorrelated as they are in our case derived by different and independent techniques. The Error Budget of the MDT has therefore two contributions, the Geoid error and the MSS error. They both simply sum up to the overall MDT error. In order to ensure spectral consistency between the two entities, the implementation of filters is an essential step for the MDT computation. For this reason, the behavior of two different filter types, anisotropic diffusive and Gaussian type filter, is investigated both, in terms of the MDT results and their covariances.
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