CoAuthors

Florence Birol (LEGOS / CTOH, France); Fernando Niño (LEGOS / CTOH, France); Sara Fleury (LEGOS / CTOH, France)

Climate change is likely to worsen many problems that coastal environments already face: shoreline erosion, coastal flooding, stress and damage of the coastal biodiversity. Sea level variation is one of the major threat for coastal zones. Improving its observation is essential to better understand and predict the behavior of the coastal ocean. Altimetry provides unique long term observational dataset to characterize how sea level variability evolves from the open ocean to the coastal ocean.

In order to optimize the completeness and the accuracy of the sea surface height information derived from satellite altimetry in coastal ocean areas, X-TRACK has been developed by CTOH (Center of Topography of the Ocean and Hydrosphere) and LEGOS (Laboratoire d'Etudes en Géophysique et Hydrologie Spatiale), and is distributed by the CTOH/LEGOS and by the operational AVISO+ service. X-TRACK is tailored for extending the use of altimetry data to coastal ocean applications and provides freely available along-track Sea Level Anomaly time series as well as along-track empirical tidal constants that cover today all the coastal oceans. We present here the last developments made in X-TRACK products as well as the perspectives for future evolution.