CoAuthors

Jean-Damien Desjonquères (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, USA); Shailen Desai (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, USA); Bruce Haines (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, USA)

The Jason-3 mission has been collecting sea level measurements along the reference 10-d repeat groundtrack, while the Jason-2 mission has been operating in its interleaved long-repeat orbit (iLRO) since July 2018, after a year spent in the long-repeat orbit (LRO). In this poster, we present a summary of calibration and validation results, which indicate that both missions continue to perform nominally.

Altimeter parameters (e.g., significant wave height, sigma0, relative sea surface height biases) from both missions correspond well to each other in spite of maneuvers and safe hold events. Furthermore, sea surface height anomaly (SSHA) crossovers and radiometer-derived parameters are stable. The standard deviations of 10-day windows of SSHA for Jason-2 are similar to Jason-3 over the iLRO time-span, but contrasts with the Jason-2 LRO time span when Jason-2 SSHA standard deviations were lower by ~4 mm.