Legresy Benoit (CSIRO, Australia); Church John (CSIRO, Australia); King Matt (University of Tasmania, Australia)

The Bass Strait altimeter validation site (40° 39’S, 145° 36’ E) has provided cycle-by-cycle estimates of absolute altimeter bias for the Jason-series reference missions since the launch of TOPEX/Poseidon. The site consists of moored oceanographic instrumentation, precision GPS buoys and land based reference receivers and a coastal tide gauge. The site has recently been enhanced with the deployment of a further moored array of instrumentation to facilitate absolute bias determination for the Sentinel-3A mission.

Here we present updated results from the Bass Strait facility. We detail results for the Jason-3 mission including sea surface height (SSH) bias and investigations into each SSH correction. We detail our method to validate the Sentinel-3A mission and present early results. We conclude with a snapshot of future plans for Sentinel-3B and SWOT missions.