An Adaptive CNN-Based Approach for Improving SWOT-Derived Sea-Level Observations Using Drifter Velocities

The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission provides unprecedented high-resolution observations of sea-surface height. However, their direct use in ocean circulation studies is complicated by the presence of small-scale unbalanced motion signals and instrumental noise, which hinder accurate estimation of geostrophic velocities. To address these limitations, we developed an adaptive convolutional neural network (CNN)-based filtering technique that refines SWOT-derived sea-level observations. The network includes multi-head attention layers to exploit information on concurrent wind fields and standard altimetry interpolation errors. We train the model with a custom loss function that accounts for the differences between geostrophic velocities computed from SWOT sea-surface topography and simultaneous in-situ drifter velocities. We compare our method to existing filtering techniques, including a U-Net-based model and a variational noise-reduction filter. Our adaptive-filtering CNN produces accurate velocity estimates while preserving small-scale features and achieving a substantial noise reduction in the spectral domain. By combining satellite and in-situ data with machine learning, this work demonstrates the potential of an adaptive CNN-based filtering approach to enhance the accuracy and reliability of SWOT-derived sea-level and velocity estimates, providing a valuable tool for global oceanographic applications.