SWOT-AdAC welcomes researchers Cheinway Hwang, Emmy TY Chang, and Daocheng Yu, CO-PIs of the South China Sea and western Pacific campaign that will focus on determination of marine gravity and eddy identification.
Cheinway Hwang (Institute of Oceanography, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan), Emmy TY Chang, (School of Geomatics, National Taiwan University, Taiwan) and Daocheng Yu, (Liaoning Technical University, China) are the new SWOT-AdAC members and CO-PIs of the South China Sea and western Pacific campaign.
The South China Sea and western Pacific campaign will focus on determination of marine gravity and eddy identification in the western South China Sea region, where the gravity field is rough and oceanic eddies are very active.
Gravity validation of SWOT observations will be carried out in the western South China Sea, where a SWOT track passes through a region of rough gravity field. If SWOT can observe precise SSHs, we can convert them to gravity anomalies, which can be assessed by the gravity values from conventional radar altimeters and from ship measurements. One question is how well SWOT can resolve gravity signals compared to conventional radar altimetry.
Results from the South China Sea will be important for confirming the data quality and resolution of sea surface heights observed by SWOT. It is expected some sort of filtering will be needed to process the raw sea surface heights from SWOT to achieve a best result in gravity recovery and eddy identification. The lessons learned from the South China sea in the gravity field and eddy modeling can be a reference for researchers around the world when such modeling is performed elsewhere.
The work of the South China Sea and western Pacific campaign within SWOT-AdAC is funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan (for C Hwang and ETY Chang).