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:Constant measuring

[ClickOnThis]

The question is, what will happen if the satellite data disagrees with the terrestrial data?

Then scientists will do what they always do in such situations: try to find out what causes the discrepancy.

The vast majority of times, such a discrepancy is caused by a faulty measuring technique or device. If that's ruled out, then you look more closely at the observations you're comparing to, for signs of error there. And if the discrepancy still persists (i.e., you have strong confidence in both sets of observations, even though they disagree) then you start to look for explanations, including possible modifications to theories, that would fit with the observations.