Earth

New Sentinel-3A Corrected Sea Surface Height Products

By Keith Cowing
Press Release
June 26, 2017
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New Sentinel-3A Corrected Sea Surface Height Products
Corrected Sea Surface Height
EUMETSAT

New Sentinel-3A Corrected Sea Surface Height products will be available on EUMETCast from 27 June.
These new products Corrected Sea Surface Height in NRT — Sentinel-3 and Corrected Sea Surface Height in STC – Sentinel-3, called ‘L2P SLA’ in short, are processed by the Sentinel-3 L2P/L3 Marine Altimetry Service (CNES/CLS), in the frame of a EUMETSAT contract, funded by the European Union.

The products are derived from the dual-frequency Synthetic Aperture Radar Altimeter (SRAL) instrument onboard Sentinel-3. They are mono-mission global products, containing 1 Hz along-track corrected sea surface heights with respect to a mean sea surface, corrections and geophysical parameters. The last versions of altimetric standards are used and there is a homogenised format for all satellites. They are generated in Near-Real Time (NRT) and Short-Time Critical (STC) timeliness. The L2P SLA products are distributed in the user friendly NetCDF format.

– The added value compared to level 2 products:
— The update of geophysical standards to calculate sea level anomalies, such as:
— FES2014 ocean tide.
— CNES/CLS 2015 mean sea surface referenced to a 20 year reference period.
— Filtered ionospheric correction.
— Dynamical atmospheric correction for L2P NRT products (instead of only inverted barometer height correction in the case of L2 NRT products).

– A validity flag to remove spurious measurements

– The distribution of L2P SLA near real time products split in passes (instead of 10 minute granules for L2 near real time products).
The Product Handbook will be made available on 27 June.

The products will be distributed on EUMETCast Europe:

More information

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