CoAuthors

Cristina Martin-Puig (NOAA/EUMETSAT, US/Germany); Eric Leuliette (NOAA, USA); Shailen Desai (NASA/JPL, USA); Nicolas Picot (CNES, France)

Jason-3 was launched in January 2016 and has been operating on the same track as Jason-2 since 12 February 2016. The tandem operation of these two altimeters is an excellent way to intercalibrate the instruments and access the product quality. This tandem phase will last until mid-September 2016. But present times are also graced with having 6 altimeters flying on-orbit (Jason-2, Jason-3, Sentinel-3A, CryoSat-2, SARAL/AltiKa, and HY-2A). Intercomparison of all six altimeters contributes as well to the cross-calibration and validation of all these missions, including Jason-3.

This presentation is intended to highlight results from the first 8 months of the operation of Jason-3, and assess the quality of the OGDR and IGDR products in comparison to Jason-2 and the other missions currently on-orbit. As part of this comparison we will discuss the impacts of the various components of the altimeter system (range measurement, orbit determination, meteorological corrections, tides, SSB, reference surface) to errors in determining sea level anomaly. Also the orbital inclination and whether the mission is covering an "unchartered" mean sea surface plays a role in this.