Villas Bôas, A. B., Lenain, L., Cornuelle, B. D., Gille, S. T., & Mazloff, M. R. (2022). A broadband view of the sea surface height wavenumber spectrum. Geophysical Research Letters, 49, e2021GL096699. https://doi.org/10.1029/2021GL096699
Airborne lidar altimetry can measure the sea surface height (SSH) over scales ranging from hundreds of kilometers to a few meters. Here we analyze the spectrum of SSH observations collected during an airborne lidar campaign conducted off the California coast. We show that that the variance in the surface wave band can be over 20 times larger than the variance at submesoscales and that the observed SSH variability is sensitive to the directionality of surface waves. Our results support the hypothesis that there is a spectral gap between meso-to-submesoscale motions and small-scale surface waves and also indicate that aliasing of surface waves into lower wavenumbers may complicate the interpretation of SSH spectra. These results highlight the importance of better understanding the contributions of different physics to the SSH variability and considering the SSH spectrum as a continuum in the context of future satellite altimetry missions.
All data needed to reproduce the analysis in this paper is availabe for download here https://doi.org/10.6075/J0W0963R
This project was funded by the SWOT program with NASA grant 80NSSC20K1136 and by the S-MODE program with NASA grant 80NSSC19K1004. LL had additional funding from NASA JPL contract 1618801.
All figures in Villas Bôas et al. (2022) can be reproduced using the Python scripts from this repository and the data. To do so, follow these steps
-
Make a local copy of this repository by either cloning or downloading it.
-
Download the data, untar the file, and move directory
datato the project root. After doing so, your directory tree should look like this:
BroadbandSpectrum/
├── data/
│ ├── AVISO/
│ ├── CDIP/
│ ├── ERA5/
│ ├── MASS/
│ └── chereskin/
├── figs/
├── notebooks/
├── src/
└── environment.yml
- Make sure that you create a Python environment with the package versions specified in
environment.yml. If you are using Conda you can run
conda env create -f environment.yml
from the project root.
- If you follow the steps above you should be able to reproduce all figures, by running the notebooks from the
notebooksdirectory without having to adjust any paths.
If you wish to use the code from this repository, you may cite it as
Villas Bôas, Ana B. (2022). Source code for: 'A Broadband View of the Sea Surface Height Wavenumber Spectrum' (v0.1). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5866770