The Roles of the S3MPC: Monitoring, Validation and Evolution of Sentinel-3 Altimetry Observations

• Published in: Remote Sensing
• Main Authors: Quartly, Graham, Nencioli, Francesco, Raynal, Matthias, Bonnefond, Pascal, Nilo Garcia, Pablo, Garcia-Mondéjar, Albert, Flores de La Cruz, Adrián, Crétaux, Jean-Francois, Taburet, Nicolas, Frery, Marie-Laure, Cancet, Mathilde, Muir, Alan, Brockley, David, Mcmillan, Malcolm, Abdalla, Saleh, Fleury, Sara, Cadier, Emeline, Gao, Qi, Escorihuela, Maria-José, Roca, Mònica, Bergé-Nguyen, Muriel, Laurain, Olivier, Bruniquel, Jérôme, Féménias, Pierre, Lucas, Bruno
• Other Authors: Systèmes de Référence Temps Espace (SYRTE), Institut national des sciences de l'Univers (INSU - CNRS)-Observatoire de Paris, Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Sorbonne Université (SU)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Laboratoire d'études en Géophysique et océanographie spatiales (LEGOS), Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD)-Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier (UT3), Université de Toulouse (UT)-Université de Toulouse (UT)-Institut national des sciences de l'Univers (INSU - CNRS)-Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées (OMP), Université de Toulouse (UT)-Université de Toulouse (UT)-Institut national des sciences de l'Univers (INSU - CNRS)-Centre National d'Études Spatiales Toulouse (CNES)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Météo-France-Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD)-Institut national des sciences de l'Univers (INSU - CNRS)-Centre National d'Études Spatiales Toulouse (CNES)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Météo-France-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Géoazur (GEOAZUR 7329), Institut national des sciences de l'Univers (INSU - CNRS)-Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur, Université Côte d'Azur (UniCA)-Université Côte d'Azur (UniCA)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD France-Sud )
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2020
• Subjects: [PHYS]Physics [physics]; [PHYS.ASTR]Physics [physics]/Astrophysics [astro-ph]; The Sentinel; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://hal.science/hal-03243266; https://hal.science/hal-03243266/document; https://hal.science/hal-03243266/file/remotesensing-12-01763-v2.pdf; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12111763

International audience 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.