Range Doppler centroid shift - altimetry comparison

Building on more than 1200 Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) acquisitions over the Golf Stream and the greater Agulhas Current, high resolution (~10 km) gridded maps of persistent Doppler-derived ocean surface velocities are generated from 2007 to 2012 with good agreement to surface drifter data. Comparison to the combined GOCE and altimeter based surface geostrophic currents are also promising and suggests that the merging of these distinct data sources could advance both the study of the spatial and temporal variability of ocean dynamics in intense surface currents. This is further highlighted in this paper.