Abstract
Recent observation reveals a stunning fact that coastal tides are
experiencing rapid change in the last century in the world.
High-accuracy tidal-level data is needed to achieve a wide and refined
understanding of the phenomenon. In-situ measurements are often sparse
and limited to fixed locations, which are insufficient to provide
information about the spatiotemporal variability of tidal processes
beyond tidal gauges. Satellite altimetry, which measures water level
with global coverage and high resolution, provides an unprecedented
opportunity to address the issue but two technical challenges prevent
such satellite-based tidal harmonic analysis: a) sampling frequency
requirement: data sampling/acquisition frequency must be at least two
times of the major tidal frequency to avoid the aliasing issue dictated
by the Nyquist theorem but satellite revisit frequency is well below the
required Nyquist frequency, and b) data length requirement: a minimum
length of sampled observation data is required to recognize a sufficient
number of tidal constituents according to the Rayleigh criterion
theorem. To address these issues, a novel Regularized Least-Square
approach is developed to substantially relax the limitation: the prior
information on the regional tidal amplitudes is used to support a
least-square analysis to obtain the amplitudes and phases of the tidal
constituents for water elevation time series of different lengths and
time intervals. The proposed method can determine the tidal amplitudes
with high accuracy and the sampling interval can be extended to the
application level of altimetry satellites. It was validated using the
data of the altimetry mission, Jason-3.