Christian Schwatke

Atmospheric delay corrections for satellite altimetry measurements are essential for deriving highly accurate sea surface heights and reliable global mean sea level (GMSL) trend estimates. A commonly used method to correct for ionospheric path delays are the usage of GNSS‐based Global Ionospheric Maps (GIM). The different orbit heights of GNSS and altimeter satellites require an adaption of GIM corrections to account for free electrons in the Earth plasmasphere. This study shows that the widely used scaling approach based on the International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) is not able to accurately scale the GIM models. The impact of neglecting the plasmaspheric part of the atmosphere strongly correlates with the solar activity of about 11 years. This manifests itself as trend errors in global GMSL. For the Jason period (2002–2021) a trend error of 0.17 mm/year can be shown, which is even larger for smaller periods (e.g., 1.0 mm/year for Jason‐1 lifetime). The application of an additional constant scaling factor of 0.886 can reduce the trend differences to below 0.05 mm/year.