MS Plan A Defense: Uncertainties of multi-decadal buoy and altimeter observations

David Leyva The impacts of climate change are evident globally. Changes to the sea state, including ocean wave heights, are important for the long-term design of ocean resources and management. Previous studies estimate multi-decadal wave height trends from satellite altimetry and wave buoy observations but they do not robustly quantify uncertainties in trends. Changes in buoy hulls, payloads, and processing may influence year-to-year variability in buoy time series and create spurious climate signals. We find that standard approaches to identify step-changes in buoy time series are highly dependent on the reference time series. This is because identifying step-changes is most

Toward a Consistent Analysis of Tropical Cyclones Winds and Waves

Alexis Mouche LOPS/IFREMER Recent satellite missions offer a unique opportunity to consistently analyse Tropical Cyclone generated ocean surface waves and associated ocean surface wind field. This includes mostly Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and altimeters missions for waves, and radiometers and SAR for wind. The measurements principles, capabilities and complementary of each mission is presented. Ocean surface wind measurements from radiometers benefit from very large coverage, high revisit time and are weakly sensitive to rain. They provide medium resolution O(50km) wind measurements that can be used for 34-, 50- and 64-kts wind radii estimates. This provides direct information on the storm

Seminar joint with Oceanography: Satellite Altimeters and Synthetic Aperture Radars: Insights into Ocean Waves

Dr. Justin E. Stopa Assistant Professor Department of Ocean and Resources Engineering University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Space-borne satellites are an integral component of Earth observing systems. Ocean surface waves, which have a continuous presence in the ocean, are routinely observed using altimeters and synthetic aperture radars (SAR). Altimeters and SARs are active sensors that operate in the microwave band which allows for continuous monitoring without restrictions related to time of day or cloud cover. In this work, both of these technologies are exploited to study various ocean wave characteristics. There are 30+ and 20+ years of wave observations from