Primary Analysis of Oceanic Mesoscale Eddies Observation Abilities by Sentinel-3A SRAL

In this study,the north-western Pacific Ocean of Kuroshio region is selected as the experimental area to analyze the mesoscale eddies observation abilities of Sentinel-3 A SRAL,including the independent detection abilities of Sentinel-3 A SRAL and the improvement of mesoscale eddies detection abilities by data fusion with other satellite altimetry data.The Sentinel-3 A SRAL data are mapped by the spatial-temporal objective analysis method to the sea level anomaly grid data.The mapping errors are analyzed by the comparisons between the grid data of different combinations and along the ground track of Jason-2/3.The independent detection abilities of Sentinel-3 A SRAL are analyzed by the comparison between the grid data and the AVISO MSLA data.On the other hand,through the multi-satellite data fusion of different combinations of Sentinel-3 A altimeter and other satellite altimeters such as Jason-2/3,the mesoscale eddies detection was performed based on the merged sea level anomaly data and the addition of Sentinel-3 A SRAL data for the improvements of mesoscale eddies detection abilities by multi-satellite altimeters are concluded.It is concluded that Sentinel-3 A SRAL has good abilities of mesoscale eddies detection as the combination of Jason-2 and Jason-3,and it is better than that of single altimeter of Jason-2 or Jason-3.