Ocean Tide Modeling in the Southern Ocean

This report was prepared by Yu Wang, a graduate research associate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Geodetic Science at the Ohio State University, under the supervision of Professor C. K. Shum. This report was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation Office of Polar Program: OPP-0088029.This report was also submitted to the Graduate School of the Ohio State University as a thesis in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Science degree.Ocean tide has been observed and studied for a long time. With its role in the complex interactions between solid earth, ocean, sea ice and the floating glacial ice shelves, tides have been identified as one of the important causes of grounding line migration, an essential factor to the study of ice mass balance and global sea level change. In addition, accurate knowledge of ocean tides is needed for studies such as tidal mixing and sea ice calving. Polar ocean tide models remain poorly understood despite of the success of global ocean tide modeling in the deep oceans. In this thesis, a study of ocean tide modeling in the Southern Ocean employing the empirical tide solution approach is presented using the multiple satellite altimetry data at crossover locations. The tidal aliasing problem in satellite altimetry is first investigated by testing the software for two frequency searching methods using simulated and actual altimetry data at crossover locations. Numerical experiments show that the software for the interval method performs better than that for the global optimization frequency searching method, by which the true original (not aliased) frequencies of the tides can be extracted from altimetry data at crossover locations. Also, using altimetry data at crossover locations can better reduce tidal aliasing than using along-track altimetry data. Altimetry data at T/P and ERS-2 dual satellite crossovers for the Southern Ocean are generated using 300 cycles of T/P data and 79 cycles of ERS-2 data. Using these data, an empirical ocean tide solution is derived using the orthotide formulations. Different weighting methods are tested, and the use of different weights at different locations is adopted as our solution strategy. The empirical tide solutions have been evaluated by comparison with several other models, including the global tide models NAO99, TPXO.6.2 and the regional model CATS02.01. The comparison shows that our solution is comparable with the selected models. The RSS of 8 major short-period ocean tides between our solution using altimetry data at dual satellite crossover locations and the selected models is 2.2 ~ 2.4 cm. And when compared with selected models in terms of standard deviation of the sea surface height residuals, our solution shows improved performance with a tidal power of 22 ~ 42 cm2 improvement over the selected models