Work

A Strictly Geostrophic Product of Sea‐Surface Velocities From the SWOT Fast‐Sampling Phase

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: While geostrophy remains the simplest and most practical balance to extract velocity information from sea‐surface height anomaly (SSHa), confusions remain within the oceanographic community to what extent this balance can be applied to altimetric observations with the launch of the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite. Given the limited temporal resolution of SWOT, many studies have resorted to claiming that the spatially filtered SSHa fields correspond to the geostrophic component. This introduces the ambiguity of which spatial scale to choose. Here, we build upon the recent developments in internal tide (IT) corrections (Yadidya, Arbic, et al., 2025, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025ea004511 ) and apply a dynamic mode decomposition (DMD)‐based method introduced by Lapo, Ichinaga, and Kutz (2025, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2415786122 ) to robustly extract the geostrophic component associated with sub‐inertial frequencies from the SWOT one‐day‐repeat orbit; we distribute the global data set as a public good. We provide the joint probability density function (PDF) of vorticity and strain, and spectra of SSHa at a few cross‐over regions.

Source: Geophysical Research Letters

DOI: 10.1029/2026gl121978