Pierre Femenias (ESA, Italy); Jerome Bouffard (ESA, Italy)

The ESA level-2 Sentinel-3 Surface Topography Mission (STM) Altimetry processor has been updated to generate three thematic products optimized for the scientific processing over the three surfaces: Inland waters (HY), Sea Ice (SI), and Land Ice (LI). To obtain a continuous and homogeneous data coverage of the Sentinel-3 STM Altimetry products, a full mission reprocessing campaign has been performed.
The reprocessing of the S3 STM Altimetry mission data set covers from the beginning of the mission (1st March 2016) up to the operational deployment of the new thematic processing chains at the ESA product services, currently planned in September 2023. The reprocessing led to the deployment of the Baseline Collection 005 (BC005).
The main updates for the sea ice level-2 processor consist of the implementation of the Hamming window and zero-padding in the processor algorithm, and the application of a dedicated sea ice mask for data assimilation over defined targets. Also, these products have equator-to-equator coverage, instead of pole-to-pole. The evolution introduced in the processing algorithm led to improvement of data quality and performance over sea ice surfaces. A highlight of the BC005 validation results is presented in this study.