Impacts on the scientific community The GEOS-3 mission provided data that furthered scientific understanding in various fields. The ocean height data set from this mission provided the first comprehensive coverage in most areas of the world's oceans, providing a better understanding of the Ocean Geoid . Ocean height also provided information about quasi-stationary departures from the geoid  , for events like currents, eddies, storm surges, etc. The return waveform data was used to better understand the sea state at a level that was comparable to buoy-collected data. An unexpected result was the ability to use waveform data to derive surface wind speed, and the ability to maintain track over terrain and ice Altimeter data from GEOS-3 has been utilized by many  gravity models, including GEM-T3, JGM-1 and JGM-2
Impacts on the scientific community The GEOS-3 mission provided data that furthered scientific understanding in various fields. The ocean height data set from this mission provided the first comprehensive coverage in most areas of the world's oceans, providing a better understanding of the ocean geoid . Ocean height also provided information about quasi-stationary departures from the geoid (the sea surface topography) , for events like currents, eddies, storm surges, etc. The return waveform data was used to better understand the sea state at a level that was comparable to buoy-collected data. An unexpected result was the ability to use waveform data to derive surface wind speed, and the ability to maintain track over terrain and ice Altimeter data from GEOS-3 has been utilized by many Earth's gravity models, including GEM-T3, JGM-1 and JGM-2
R
Ocean Geoid
ocean geoid
A
(the sea surface topography)
A
Earth's