Northeast sector of the Greenland Ice Sheet to undergo the greatest inland expansion of supraglacial lakes during the 21st century", Geophysical Research Letters, , pp. n/a-n/a. Volume number and inclusive page numbers are missing.
The Sentinel-3 Mission Performance Centre (S3MPC) is tasked by the European Space Agency (ESA) to monitor the health of the Copernicus Sentinel-3 satellites and ensure a high data quality to the users. This paper deals exclusively with the effort devoted to the altimeter and microwave radiometer, both components of the Surface Topography Mission (STM). The altimeters on Sentinel-3A and -3B are the first to operate in delay-Doppler or SAR mode over all Earth surfaces, which enables better spatial resolution of the signal in the along-track direction and improved noise reduction through multi-looking, whilst the radiometer is a two-channel nadir-viewing system. There are regular routine assessments of the instruments through investigation of telemetered housekeeping data, calibrations over selected sites and comparisons of geophysical retrievals with models, in situ data and other satellite systems. These are performed both to monitor the daily production, assessing the uncertainties and errors on the estimates, and also to characterize the long-term performance for climate science applications. This is critical because an undetected drift in performance could be misconstrued as a climate variation. As the data are used by the Copernicus Services (e.g., CMEMS, Global Land Monitoring Services) and by the research community over open ocean, coastal waters, sea ice, land ice, rivers and lakes, the validation activities encompass all these domains, with regular reports openly available. The S3MPC is also in charge of preparing improvements to the processing, and of the development and tuning of algorithms to improve their accuracy. This paper is thus the first refereed publication to bring together the analysis of SAR altimetry across all these different domains to highlight the benefits and existing challenges.
Over the past 20 years, satellite radar altimetry has shown its ability to revolutionise our understanding of the ocean and climate. Previously, these advances were largely limited to ice-free regions, neglecting large portions of the Polar Regions. Launched in 2010, the European Space Agency's (ESA) polar-orbiting CryoSat satellite was specifically designed to measure changes in the thickness of polar sea ice and the elevation of the ice sheets and mountain glaciers. To reach this goal, the CryoSat products have to meet the highest performance standards, achieved through continual improvements of the associated Instrument Processing Facilities. Since April 2015, the CryoSat ice products are generated with Baseline-C, which represented a major processor upgrade. Several improvements were implemented in this new Baseline, most notably the release of freeboard data within the Level 2 products. The Baseline-C upgrade has brought significant improvements to the quality of Level-1B and Level-2 products relative to the previous Baseline-B products, which in turn is expected to have a positive impact on the scientific exploitation of CryoSat measurements over land ice and sea ice. This paper provides an overview of the CryoSat ice data quality assessment and evolutions, covering all quality control and calibration activities performed by 2 ESA and its partners. Also discussed are the forthcoming evolutions of the processing chains and improvements anticipated in the next processing Baseline.
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