CoAuthors

Marc Naeije (TU Delft, Netherlands ); Jerome Bouffard (ESA, Italy); Pierre Femenias (ESA , Italy)

CryoSat-2 was launched on the 8th of April 2010, the primary purpose of the mission is to measure sea ice thickness, however the mission is also able to monitor land ice volume variations and ocean height changes. The primary instrument is the Siral altimeter, it comes with an unprecedented accuracy and precision capable of measuring in a low resolution mode LRM, a synthetic aperture mode SAR and an interferometric SAR mode known as SARin. Over ocean areas there are SAR calibration zones, within these zones there is an algorithm to reduce the SAR data to pseudo-LRM data (RDSAR data). In this paper we validate CryoSat-2 LRM and RDSAR measurements and the new ESA ocean dataset developed for CryoSat-2, these are IOP and GOP ocean datasets made available by ESA. In addition we assess the IOP and GOP products with other altimeters; we focus on long term monitoring and cross-calibration with other ocean altimeter data in the Radar Altimeter Database System RADS. We also perform long term monitoring by comparing the CryoSat-2 ocean sea level data with a selected set of tide gauges. In this way we are able to evaluate the stability of the measurement system and the identification of possible biases and bias drifts.