The Arctic marine gravity field - A new era with Cryosat-2 SAR altimetry

DTU10 is the current state of the art global ocean wide satellite altimetry derived gravity field computed at the DTU Space in Denmark covering all marine regions of the world including the Arctic Ocean up to the North Pole. A number of geophysical phenomena in the open ocean are, however, still unresolved by conventional 1 Hz altimetry as it generally do not map scales below the 15-20 km scale. Consequently these will not show up in global marine gravity fields like DTU10. The recently launched ESA Cryosat-2 offers up to a factor of 20 better spatial resolution compared with conventional altimetry used to derive i.e., DTU10. This offered by SAR, or Delay-Doppler (DD) altimeter. With the launch of Cryosat covering all oceans up to 88N and with its 369 day repeat and 7 km ground track spacing at the equator a very exciting new source of gravity has become available. The first exciting results from employing the Croysat-2 data to gravity field modeling in the Arctic Ocean focusing on the Baffin Bay are presented in this work. The Baffin Bay is currently under massive investigation and operating in this area is becoming more and more possible due to recent climate change.