Long-Term Validation of Wave Height Measurements from Altimeters

Since July 1991, six altimeter missions have been launched successfully, and they have provided almost continuous wave height measurements for more than 12 years. Long-term series of wave height measurements are of major interest for climatology and oceanic wave modeling. Before using such data, the measurements have to be validated, and the homogeneity of the data from various satellites has to be checked. Significant wave height measurements from ERS, TOPEX/Poseidon, GEOSAT Follow-on, Jason-1 and ENVISAT altimeters are validated using cross-altimeter and buoy comparisons. Emphasis is put on the two recent missions Jason-1 and ENVISAT. Corrections for biases and trends are proposed for the six altimeters, allowing the generation of consistent and homogeneous data. Tests of these corrections are performed over global ocean simple statistics.