A note on removing elastic ocean tide from the TOPEX/POSEIDON data

Elastic ocean tide is a major contributor to sea level variability, particularly observed by altimeters on board satellites, which creates difficulties in interpreting ocean variability at lower frequencies. A filtering procedure to remove the effect of tides in the TOPEX/POSEIDON (T/P) altimetric data is proposed as an alternative to the standard models. The results obtained with T/P measurements where the semi-diurnal amplitudes are high, particularly over the shelf, in the tropical Atlantic (15 degreesN-15 degreesS; 060 degreesW-020 degreesE) show that the filtering procedure is adequate to remove tides even in shallow regions.