Improved wet path delays for all ESA and reference altimetric missions

摘要

The wet tropospheric correction (WTC) is still a significant error source in most altimetric products. For studies such as sea level change, as those performed in the scope of the ESA Sea Level Climate Change Initiative (SL_cci) project, the use of uniform and consistent WTC datasets are of major importance. For this purpose, a set of improved WTC, using the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) derived Path Delay (GPD) algorithm, was envisaged for the main six altimetric missions: the so-called reference missions (TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason-1 and Jason-2) and the three ESA missions (ERS-1, ERS-2 and Envisat).