Gérald Dibarboure (CLS, France); Matthias Raynal (CLS, France); Claire Dufau (CLS, France); Yannice Faugère (CLS, France); Amandine Guillot (CNES, France); Nicolas Picot (CNES, France)

For non repeat missions, the Mean Sea Surface significantly contributes to the altimetric error budget. With HY2A and Altika now on drifting orbits, and the successful launch of Sentinel3-A on a new ground track, the knowledge of this error become crucial for ocean applications (eg CMEMS Sea Level products).
Several MSS have been released this last 6 years, and the latest versions use geodetic missions such as CryoSat-2 and Jason-1 GM which strongly contribute to improve their resolution and accuracy. The goal of this paper is to characterize the error of these MSS fields.This study, mainly based on spectral approach allows us to quantify the errors at various wavelengths. The use of new missions with low instrumental noise measurement levels (Ka, SAR) opens new perspectives to understand the MSS errors.