Preliminary analysis on GOCE contribution to the Mediterranean Sea circulation

One of the main objectives of the ESA Gravity field and Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) is to investigate the oceanic circulation by means of high accuracy satellite gravity observations. In this framework the Mediterranean Sea is certainly a complicated test area and the study of its circulation is particularly tangled and requires the knowledge of a geoid with extremely high resolution and accuracy. In the present work a combination of the EGM2008 global model and a GOCE-derived solution is used in connection with the CNES-CLS11 mean sea surface (MSS) to estimate the Mediterranean geodetic mean dynamic topography (MDT). In order to assess the accuracy of the GOCE-derived products for oceanographic purposes, the geostrophic currents computed from geodetic MDT are compared to those obtained with independent drifter observations. It comes out that the GOCE solution well describes the mean circulation patterns and the main dynamical features improving the EGM2008 solution.