Tide gauges have been critical sources for sea level research, enabling the development of tidal theory and an understanding of local variations that occur across the global oceans. Tides play important roles in a variety of oceanographic and geodetic applications, and characterizing their spatial variability is valuable for applications ranging from fishing to flood risk management. This manuscript presents the coastal charac...

New Caledonia, in the southwestern tropical Pacific, has recently been identified as a hot spot for energetic semidiurnal internal tides. In a companion paper, the life cycle of coherent internal tides, characterized by fixed amplitude and phase, was investigated in the region through harmonic analysis of a year-long, hourly time series from numerical simulation output. In this study, we investigate the temporal variability of...

This study focuses on the internal tides (ITs) off the Amazon shelf in the tropical Atlantic. It is based on 2 km horizontally gridded observations along the swaths of SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography) track 20 during the calibration/validation phase (Cal/Val, 1 d orbit) from late March to early July 2023. We evaluate the amplitude of M2, N2, and S2 frequencies and use the M2 atlas as an internal tide correction model...

The southwestern tropical Pacific exhibits a complex bathymetry and represents a hot spot of internal-tide generation. Based on a tailored high-resolution regional model, we investigate for the first time the internal-tide field around the New Caledonia islands through energy budgets that quantify the coherent internal-tide generation, propagation, and dissipation. A total of 15.27 GW is converted from the barotropic to the ba...

The Amazon shelf break is a key region for internal tide (IT) generation. It also shows a large seasonal variation in circulation and associated stratification. This study, based on a high-resolution model (1/36∘) explicitly forced by tide, aims to better characterize how the ITs vary between two contrasted seasons. During the season from March to July (MAMJJ) the currents and mesoscale eddies are weak while the pycnocline is...

This study proposes an approach to estimate the ocean sea surface height signature of coherent internal tides from a 25-year along-track altimetry record, with a single inversion over time, resolving both internal tide contributions and mesoscale eddy variability. The inversion is performed on a reduced-order basis of topography and practically achieved with a conjugate gradient. The particularity of this approach is to mitiga...

The forthcoming SWOT altimetric missions aim to resolve the mesoscale with an unprecedented spatial resolution and swath. However, high-frequency processes, such as tides, are undersampled in time and aliased onto lower frequencies, so they need to be corrected properly. Unlike barotropic tides, internal tides (ITs) are not completely stationary and have significant temporal variability due to their interactions with the ocean...

Since the mid-1990s, a series of FES (finite element solution) global ocean tidal atlases has been produced and released with the primary objective to provide altimetry missions with tidal de-aliasing correction at the best possible accuracy. We describe the underlying hydrodynamic and data assimilation design and accuracy assessments for the latest FES2014 release (finalized in early 2016), especially for the altimetry de-ali...

Altimeter measurements are corrected for several geophysical parameters in order to access ocean signals of interest, like mesoscale or sub-mesoscale variability. The ocean tide is one of the most critical corrections due to the amplitude of the tidal elevations and to the aliasing phenomena of high-frequency signals into the lower-frequency band, but the internal-tide signatures at the ocean surface are not yet corrected glob...

Intense equatorward western boundary currents transit the Solomon Sea, where active mesoscale structures exist with energetic internal tides. In this marginal sea, the mixing induced by these features can play a role in the observed water mass transformation. The objective of this paper is to document the M2 internal tides in the Solomon Sea and their impacts on the circulation and water masses, based on two regional simulatio...

The processes that contribute to the flat sea surface height (SSH) wavenumber spectral slopes observed in the tropics by satellite altimetry are examined in the tropical Pacific. The tropical dynamics are first investigated with a 1∕12∘ global model. The equatorial region from 10∘ N to 10∘ S is dominated by tropical instability waves with a peak of energy at 1000 km wavelength, strong anisotropy, and a cascade of energy from 6...