Abstract The presence of sea-ice in the Arctic Ocean plays a significant role in the Arctic climate. Sea-ice dampens the ocean tide amplitude with the result that global tidal models perform less accurately in the polar regions. This paper presents, a kinematic processing of global positioning system (GPS) placed on sea-ice, at six different sites north of Greenland for the preliminary study of sea surface height (SSH), and tidal analysis to improve tide models in the Central Arctic. The GPS measurements are compared with the Arctic tide model AOTIM-5, which assimilates tide-gauges and altimetry data. The results show coherence between the GPS buoy measurements, and the tide model. Furthermore, we have proved that the reference ellipsoid of WGS84, can be interpolated to the tidal defined zero level by applying geophysical corrections to the GPS data.