Scientists Plot Sea Levels Using GPS Satellites (engadget.com)

A team from the UK's National Oceanography Centre (NOC), University of Michigan and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have discovered a new way to accurately measure the sea level. The technique is called GNSS-R, and involves bouncing low-powered signals from GPS satellites off of the ocean's surface and measuring the reflected signal with a GNSS-R receiver. The team used a research satellite launched last year as a GNSS-R receiver, but it will be able to tap a new constellation of receivers that NASA is launching this year as part of CYGNSS. That mission will make accurate measurements of surface winds using GPS satellites, but NOC scientists will be able to use them to measure ocean levels, too, yielding a thirty-fold increase in such data.

Comments

Re:When the satellites show that...

[ClickOnThis]

When the satellites show that the sea level isn't rising

I doubt that will happen, because we already have evidence that it is rising.

Re:Rising sea levels

[bloodstar]

Of note, the use of GPS for surveying sea surface height has proposed or experimented with for a number of years (Cardellach, Estel; Martin-Neira, Manuel., April 2010). It might be because they've moved beyond 'proof of concept', but I think to say they discovered it is a bit strong. I've even found papers detailing the experimental use of GPS satellites to determine sea surface heights as far back as 2001 (Martin-Neira, M; Caparrini, M; Font-Rossello, J; Lannelongue, S; Vallmitjana, C S, 2001). The bggest change might be a reduction of errors, going from (30cm errors in 2000 to 5 - 15cm in 2009. If they've managed to further reduce the size of the errors then they're onto something really big. If they've just found a more efficient method of measuring sea surface heights in the open ocean, well that's pretty cool, but I'm not sure it's quite a game breaker.

As far as sea surface rise being a hoax, that's a silly statement, after all the empirical evidence is pretty strong, We have long term gauges that have been operating for centuries in a number of areas, and excepting for regions of crustal rebound, raw sea level rise is consistent with expectations if additional heat was being pumped into and inceasing the depth of the thermocline..