CoAuthors

Salvatore Dinardo (Serco/ESRIN, Italy); Jérôme Benveniste (European Space Agency/ESRIN, Italy)

Significant wave height (SWH) and surface wind speed (WS) products from the CryoSat-2 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Mode are validated against operational ECMWF atmospheric and wave model results in addition to available observations from buoys, platforms and other altimeters. The data used here is output from the SAMOSA ocean model processed in the ESRIN G-POD service open to the Community called SAR Versatile Altimetric Toolkit for Ocean Research & Exploitation (SARvatore). The data cover two geographic boxes: one in the northeast Atlantic Ocean extending from 32°N to 70°N and from 20°W to the prime meridian (NE Atlantic Box) and the other in eastern Pacific extending from 2.5°S to 25.5°S and from 160°W to 85°W (Pacific Box). The period extends from 6 September 2010 to 30 June 2014 for the NE Atlantic box and from 7 May 2012 to 30 June 2014 for the Pacific Box. The amount of data is limited by the CryoSat SAR mode acquisition capability over ocean but high enough to ensure robustness and significativeness of the results (Sentinel-3 will operate in SAR mode over the whole ocean). The results show that the quality of both SWH and WS products is very high. Detailed statistics will be reported.