CoAuthors

Tommaso Parrinello (ESA | European Space Agency, Italy); Marco Meloni (SERCO c/o ESA, Italy)

Launched in 2010, the ESA’s CryoSat satellite was the first European Polar mission specifically designed to measure changes in the thickness of the sea ice and the elevation of the ice sheets and mountain glaciers. In its 10 years of operations, CryoSat has achieved its mission objectives over the Cryosphere and has triggered new scientific questions. CryoSat has also shown to be an important flying laboratory, delivering high-resolution topography measurements which are vital to prepare the design of future Polar altimetry missions (e.g. CRISTAL HPCM). Several projects are currently conducted by ESA in order to measure snow depth from space on both sea and land, improving the accuracy of sea ice thickness measurements and ice-sheet elevation time series. In this context, ESA has recently changed the orbit of CryoSat to periodically align with NASA's ICESat-2, providing radar and lidar measurements of the same ice, at nearly the same time. The purpose of this paper is to provide a general overview of the mission achievements while giving programmatic highlights in its new extended phase until 2022. This paper also presents the status of the CryoSat data products, including the new Cryo-TEMPO, which will aim at maximizing the use of the mission for new operational and science applications over multiple surfaces.