CoAuthors

Francois Bignalet-Cazalet (Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales, France); Shailen Desai (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech, United States); Jean-Damien Desjonquères (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech, United States); Nicolas Picot (Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales, France); Helene Roinard (Collecte Localisation Satellites, France)

The TOPEX/POSEIDON mission was launched on August 10, 1992 and operated until October 9, 2005. We present a summary and performance analysis of the most recent reprocessing of the TOPEX altimeter data. The original TOPEX Geophysical Data Record products were affected by altimeter instrument degradation and drifts in the radiometer path delay correction during the time of the mission. In addition, the standards for the models used to derive the sea-level time series are now considered obsolete. As a major upgrade to the original TOPEX Geophysical Data Record (MGDR-B) products, new so-called GDR-F products have been generated that benefit from a number of significant improvements: in particular, the GDR-F products apply numerical retracking of the altimeter data, the end-of-mission radiometer calibration, recent reprocessing of the orbit solutions, and GDR-F standards for the auxiliary corrections. The evolution of updates applied to the new GDR-F product will be presented together with their effect on the performance. In addition, a cross-platform analysis will be performed using observations during its tandem phase with Jason-1 (December 7, 2001 – August 15, 2002) to assess the performance of the new GDR-F product.