Scientific Themes for the 20 Year Symposium
The symposium will be organised around key papers, presenting the challenges we have overcome to develop our current understanding of the Earth’s surface variations observed by altimetry, and the perspectives for future developments in each of the following themes:
* 20 years of Progress in Radar Altimetry: a historical perspective (keynote presentations)
- historical overview
- lessons learned
- successful and unachievable projects, unexpected applications (e.g., River and Lake level monitoring, regional
- mean sea level trend monitoring, Global Digital Elevation Models, hurricane prediction, soil moisture)
* Advances in our understanding of the open ocean
- mesoscale ocean currents and fronts
- mean ocean circulation and absolute dynamic topography
- large scale ocean phenomena: intra-seasonal and seasonal varations, El Niño and other climate modes,
decadal changes - global & regional mean sea level monitoring
- tidal modeling, internal waves, high frequency signals
- marine meteorology, surface waves and wind speed, detecting rain, gas exchange fluxes at the surface
* Advances in our understanding of coastal processes
- specialised coastal data processing (retracking, geophysical corrections, …)
- applications of coastal altimetry in synergy with other data sets & models for the understanding of coastal processes
* Advances in our understanding of the Cryosphere
- specialised high latitude data processing (retracking, geophysical corrections, …)
- Antarctic and Greenland mass balance
- sea ice monitoring, sea ice thickness
- continental glaciers
- ocean-ice exchange
* Altimetry over Land
- specialised data processing for inland water applications
- river and lake level monitoring
- land - ocean exchange
- developing global Digital Elevation Models
- land processes, surface roughness and soil moisture
* Altimetric contributions to gravity field, marine geoid, bathymetry modeling and orbit determination
- impact of altimetric geodetic missions, further improvements, and expectations.
- marine geoid and ocean floor topography mapping
- orbit determination and tailored gravity models: contributions of DORIS, PRARE, GPS, laser techniques and altimetry
- combined results from gravimetric missions (CHAMP, GRACE, GOCE)
- improved mean sea surfaces
* Building the 20-year altimetric record: challenges and achievements
- (cross-)calibration and long-term monitoring of instruments: biases, drift models, shortcomings
- multi-satellite sea level change: the spatial and temporal record
- advances in precision: towards the fine scale 1 cm challenge!
- interesting/unexpected scientific results (global and regional mean sea level trends, lake and river trends, ice volume trends, interannual changes in eddy processes, decadal oscillations...)
* Synergy between Altimetry, other data and models: "the integrated approach"
- comparison with in-situ data: tide gauges, ship data, buoys and Argo profilers, HF Radar ...
- sea level, sea surface temperature and salinity, ocean colour, scatterometry : the synergy of space observations
- altimetry impact in ocean monitoring and forecasting operational systems
* Outlook
- requirements for future altimetric missions (Oceanography, Cryosphere, Coastal Zone, Land)
- operational oceanography missions and continuity
- new generation altimeters (SAR and interferometry)
- merging Altimetry data with longterm spaceborne wind, sea surface temperature, ocean colour and gravity mission data
* Outreach
- educational programmes
- science return for the public
- the use of the internet and other media in promoting satellite altimetry