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2012 Images of the Month

Dec. 2012: Winds and currents around India: India has a climate much influenced by the ocean. The knowledge of currents is thus of foremost importance for the whole country. Using the full twenty-years time series of altimeter data enables to correlate winds and currents with a great confidence.
Nov. 2012: Arctic trends: Dedicated processing enable to access to sea level anomalies over the Arctic ocean (when not iced), and monitor their variations.
Oct. 2012: Accelerated eddy shedding: Agulhas and Agulhas retroflection eddy shedding in the Atlantic seems to be increasing during the last sixteen years, with a possible link with climate variations.
Sep. 2012: Getting smaller details: The merging of multiple altimeter missions improves the resolution of altimetry-derived maps. However, in some regions like the Mediterranean, even more processing, and inclusion of other kind of data are needed to reach enough resolution.
Aug. 2012: Altimetry, 20 years and still growing: In 20 years since Topex/Poseidon launch, altimetry has grown, and is still growing, in the number of uses as well as users
Jul. 2012: North Atlantic Subpolar front shifts: The way that currents' main fronts shift is one of the information brought by multi-year datasets. With now nearly 20 years of altimetry, such shifts begin to emerge and be more and more studied, correlated with other variations, either (or both) in the ocean or the atmosphere.
Jun. 2012: Antarctica thinning seen by Envisat: Antarctica glaciers are moving and react differently depending on the geographical area. In West Antarctica, glaciers are thinning, losing up to several meters a year and this thinning is accelerating. In East Antarctica, some glaciers are losing thickness, but without any observable acceleration.
May 2012: Jellyfish on the move: Jellyfish are carried by ocean currents. Altimetry enables to describe those and, with coastal processing, to help forecast jellyfish strandings on the Mediterranean beaches.
Apr. 2012: Phenomenal seas: The highest significant wave height ever measured by an altimeter was in the North Atlantic during the Quirin storm. Comparison with other source of data corroborate the altimetric estimates, even if those are higher than the values usually considered as valid.
Mar. 2012: Following Kuroshio paths: Kuroshio is one of the major currents. With 20 years of continuous data, altimetry enable to catch year-to-year variation in the path of a current, and to better understand its mechanisms. Understanding, monitoring and forecasting its changing path is important for climate predictions
Feb. 2012: Up North: Comparison of altimetry data with in situ measurements in the north polar seas demonstrates that altimetry products can be used to study oceanic variability in the region.
Jan. 2012: Tsunami debris on the Pacific: March 2011 tsunami that hit Japan rejected a huge quantity of debris in the Pacific. Monitoring and forecasting those, using in particular altimetry, is becoming vital.