Assessment of Ocean Tide Models on the Ice-Covered Sea Around the Antarctica by the

Abstract

The dynamically-varying sea ice is blocking efforts to measure the ocean tide on the circum-Antarctic sea. Recently, the laser altimetry data from the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) provided an opportunity to estimate the freeboard height of sea ice over the Arctic Ocean and around the Antarctica. The technique of deriving freeboard statistically detects the leads, which are stretches of open water or thin ice within fields of sea ice, to determine the along-track sea surface height as the ocean reference level for the freeboard heights. Based on this method, we estimate the sea surface height and the freeboard height from ICESat measurements over the circum- Antarctic sea. We then assess the accuracies of six ocean tide models (GPT99.2, GOT4.7, TPXO7.1, TPXO7.2, FES04, and CATS2008a) using the crossover difference of sea surface height.