Global ocean tides through assimilation of oceanographic and altimeter satellite data in a hydrodynamic model

Ocean tides must be considered in many scientific disciplines: astronomy, oceanography, geodesy, geophysics, meteorology, and space technologies. Progress in each of these disciplines leads to the need for greater knowledge and more precise predictions of the ocean tide contribution. This is particularly true of satellite altimetry. On one side, the present and future satellite altimetry missions provide and will supply new data that will contribute to the improvement of the present ocean tide solutions. On the other side, tidal corrections included in the Geophysical Data Records must be determined with the maximum possible accuracy. The valuable results obtained with satellite altimeter data thus far have not been penalized by the insufficiencies of the present ocean tide predictions included in the geophysical data records (GDR's) because the oceanic processes investigated have shorter wavelengths than the error field of the tidal predictions, so that the residual errors of the tidal corrections are absorbed in the empirical tilt and bias corrections of the satellite orbit. For future applications to large-scale oceanic phenomena, however, it will no longer be possible to ignore these insufficiencies.