Sea surface height (SSH) data provide critical information to scientists and researchers about processes such as sea level rise, storm predictions, ocean currents. This helps deepen understanding of important topics like climate change and ocean habitats.

Tide gauges have measured sea level over the last 200 years, with some records extending back to 1807. One disadvantage to tide gauges, though, is that they only provide regional coverage. The satellite altimetric record, on the other hand, provides accurate measurements of sea level with near-global coverage. The disadvantage of satellite data, however, is that the satellite ocean altimetry record only goes back to 1992.

Combining satellite altimetry with tide gauges using a technique known as sea level reconstruction results in a dataset with the record length of the tide gauges and the near-global coverage of satellite altimetry. NASA provides many datasets to aid the study of sea level rise, such as the Reconstructed Sea Level dataset, which contains sea level anomalies derived from satellite altimetry and tide gauges with a time span from 1950 through 2009.