Mean Sea Surface (mss)

Mean sea surface auxiliary data files are mostly global static files that contain the mean sea surface height relative to a certain ellipsoid.

This information is required for deriving freeboard acurately in the Level-2 processor.

DTU21 Mean Sea Surface - (DTU21)

Configuration

The Auxiliary Dataset ID is mss:dt21 since pysiral version 0.12 and the configuration in the auxiliary data definition of the Level-2 processor definition file is:

- mss:
    name: dtu21
    options:
        latitude_range: [45.0, 90.0]

Options

latitude_range: The latitude range to be used for subsetting the global mean sea surface data before mapping the content to the radar altimeter trajectory. The latitude range is defined as [<latitude_min>, <latitude_max>] and the values in decimal degrees need to be adapted to the target Hemisphere.

Data Variables

The following variables are returned from this dataset:

mean_sea_surface: Mean sea surface height in meters relative to the WGS84 ellipsoid

Data Source and Storage

The DTU21 mean sea surface data is sourced from the DTU Space [DTU21-MSS], Technical University of Denmark. The required file is the global 1 minute grid in netCDF format and referenced to the TOPEX ellipsoid.

<source directory as defined in local_machine_def.yaml>
└── DTU21MSS_1min.mss.nc

[DTU21-MSS]

Andersen, Ole Baltazar (2022). DTU21 Mean Sea Surface. Technical University of Denmark. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.11583/DTU.19383221.v2