MSS93A - A NEW STATIONARY SEA-SURFACE COMBINING ONE-YEAR UPGRADED ERS-1 FAST DELIVERY DATA AND 1987 GEOSAT ALTIMETER DATA

At the German Processing and Archiving Facility (D-PAF) an off-line al timeter data processing system has been developed with the capability to handle different satellite missions. For combining data from differ ent missions an algorithm has been implemented that processes a refere nce sea surface from altimeter data of one mission while other mission data is taken to improve the spatial resolution of this reference mod el. In this way a stationary sea surface (MSS93A) was computed by comp iling upgraded ERS-1 fast delivery data of the first year of the 35 da y repeat cycle together with Geosat T2 GDRs of 1987. MSS93A was valida ted by means of comparisons to external models, gradient method and vi sualization techniques.