CoAuthors

Estelle Obligis (EUMETSAT, Germany); Hilary Wilson (EUMETSAT, Germany); Anja Stromme (ESA, Italy)

The Copernicus Programme, being Europe’s Earth Observation and Monitoring Programme led by the European Union, aims to provide, on a sustainable basis, reliable and timely services related to environmental and security issues. The Sentinel-3 mission forms part of the Copernicus Space Component. Its main objectives, are to measure water-surface topography, sea- and land-surface temperature and ocean- and land-surface color in support of ocean forecasting systems, and for environmental and climate monitoring. The series of Sentinel-3 satellites ensures global, frequent and near-real-time ocean, ice and land monitoring, with the provision of observation data in a routine, long-term and continuous fashion, with a consistent quality and a high level of reliability and availability.

The Copernicus Sentinel-3 (S3) mission is today flying in constellation following the successful launch of the S3B satellite (April 2018) and associated commissioning phase. The first satellite, S3A, was launched in February 2016 and is nominally operated in routine phase since October 2017 along now with S3B, this latter being 140˚ ahead of S3A on the same orbit plane.

The Sentinel-3 mission is jointly operated by ESA and EUMETSAT. ESA is responsible for the operations, maintenance and evolution of the Sentinel-3 ground segment on LAND and NTC atmospheric related products and EUMETSAT for the MARINE and NRT atmospheric products.

This paper aims at presenting an overview of the S3 mission, with a focus on the Surface Topography Mission (STM) products, their associated performances, and an outlook on the Sentinel-3 C&D units.