CoAuthors

Christopher WATSON (University of Tasmania, Australia); Madeleine CAHILL (CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, Climate Science Centre, Australia); John ANDREWARTHA (CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, Australia)

The Bass Strait satellite altimetry calibration site has provided a valuable and sustained contribution to absolute bias determination since TOPEX/Poseidon was launched. Sentinel-3A happens to have a cross-over point just 8km off the historical Jason mooring calibration site. We have therefore extended our calibration facility to Sentinel-3A. We have also instrumented a third site in preparation for Sentinel-3B. Here, we show the strategy we adopted to develop this facility extension to the Copernicus missions. We present the calibration results of the first year in operation. Using an operational regional ocean model (SHOC) we qualified the expectable differences in SSH measured at the 2 sites. We then install a simple bottom pressure mooring at the Sentinel-3A cross-over site.
Here we show the comparison between moorings and model and the absolute calibration over the first year of satellite operations for the available geophysical products. We also show the validation and analysis of the Jason-3 and Sentinel-3A in the Bass Strait area with altimetry/model comparisons.
The Mooring data are recovered in September which will allow us to present the Jason-3 and Sentinel-3 biases statistics computed over 1+ year of data at the OSTST 2017.