Bugshin Djath (Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht, Germany); Lionel Ganachaud (LEGOS, France); Fernando Niño (CTOH / LEGOS, France); Florence Birol (LEGOS, France); Jacques Verron (LGGE, France); Nicolas Fuller (LEGOS, France)

The SARAL/AltiKa satellite is the first ocean altimeter mission to operate in Ka-band frequency. The objective of this paper is to investigate the extent to which SARAL/AltiKa sea level measurements provide valuable information in a complex bathymetric region, the semi enclosed Solomon Sea. The data editing procedure is revisited and we propose two new data editing criteria. The first one is based on the detection of erroneous sea level values after computation and the second one analyzes directly the radar measurement and geophysical corrections. We show that both methods are significantly more efficient than the standard procedure used in operational processing chains. Sea level variations derived from altimeter data is very sensitive to the choice of the Mean Sea Surface Height used in the processing. The MSS_CNES_CLS11 solution provides the best result in our area. The performance of SARAL/AltiKA mission is finally evaluated in comparison with the classical Ku-band Jason-2 altimeter. SARAL/AltiKa provides significantly more observations in the near-shore region. The lower level of instrumental noise in SARAL/AltiKA measurements modifies the shape of along-track sea level wavenumber spectra which appears closer to the information provided by regional numerical model studies.