Geostrophic Currents in the northern Nordic Seas - A Combined Dataset of Multi-Mission Satellite Altimetry and Ocean Modeling (data)

The data set contains combined Dynamic Ocean Topography (DOT) and geostrophic velocity components for the northern Nordic Seas between 1995 and 2012. It was produced in the frame of the DFG project NEG-OCEAN: Variations in ocean currents, sea-ice concentration, and sea surface temperature along the North-East coast of Greenland. The data is provided as Format 4 Classic NetCDF files on an unstructured triangular, Finite Element formulated grid. The data are characterized by daily sampling between 18.5.1995 and 3.4.2012 including data gaps and a consistent spatial resolution up to 1 km. More details can be found in the related User Manual. The dataset is based on Dynamic Ocean Topography (DOT) elevations from a combination of along-track satellite altimetry measurements with simulated differential water heights from the Finite Element Sea-ice Ocean Model Version 1.4 (FESOM, Wekerle et al., 2017, doi:10.1002/2017JC012974). The combination approach is described in detail in the related publication. The altimetry data include observations of the ESA satellites Envisat and ERS-2. The high-frequent altimetry range observations are retracked using the ALES+ algorithm (Passaro et al., 2018, doi:10.1016/j.rse.2018.02.074) and are classified into open-water/sea-ice conditions by applying a classification algorithm (Müller et al., 2017, doi:10.3390/rs9060551). All applied atmospheric and geophysical altimetry corrections are listed in Müller et al., 2019 (doi:10.5194/tc-13-611-2019).