The lineage of the name begins with the JASO1 meeting (JASO=Journées Altimétriques Satellitaires pour l'Océanographie) in Toulouse, France to study the problems of assimilating altimeter data in models.

Jason-1's measurements of sea surface height reveal where this heat is stored, how it moves around Earth by ocean currents, and how these processes affect weather and climate.

Soon after this incident, two new small pieces of space debris were observed in orbits slightly lower than Jason-1's, and spectroscopic analysis eventually proved them to have originated from Jason-1.

Data from these missions are used to improve ocean models, forecast hurricane intensity, and identify and track large ocean/atmosphere phenomena such as El Niño and La Niña.

The data are also used every day in applications as diverse as routing ships, improving the safety and efficiency of offshore industry operations, managing fisheries, and tracking marine mammals.

Data from these missions are used to improve ocean models, forecast hurricane intensity, and identify and track large ocean/atmosphere phenomena such as El Niño and La Niña.

The data are also used every day in applications as diverse as routing ships, improving the safety and efficiency of offshore industry operations, managing fisheries, and tracking marine mammals.

They ended the traditional notion of a quasi-steady, large-scale pattern of global ocean circulation by proving that the ocean is changing rapidly on all scales, from huge features such as El Niño and La Niña, which can cover the entire equatorial Pacific, to tiny eddies swirling off the large Gulf Stream in the Atlantic.

Mean sea level measurements from Jason-1 are continuously graphed at the Centre National d'Études Spatiales web site, on the Aviso page.

The data record from these altimetry missions has given scientists important insights into how global sea level is affected by natural climate variability, as well as by human activities.

Thousands of kilometers wide, these waves are driven by wind under the influence of Earth's rotation and are important mechanisms for transmitting climate signals across the large ocean basins.

At high latitudes, they travel twice as fast as scientists believed previously, showing the ocean responds much more quickly to climate changes than was known before these missions.

There, the energy is consumed by mixing water of different properties, a fundamental mechanism in the physics governing the general circulation of the ocean.