CoAuthors

Daniel Medeiros Moreira (CPRM, Brazil); Taina Conchy (UEA, Brazil); Stéphane Calmant (IRD, France); Adrien Paris (CLS, France)

Because 1- SARAL only flew for 3 years on its nominal -repeat- orbit, and 2- the gap with ENVISAT makes it diffcult to append the SARAL series with the ENVISAT ones, it has been little used today to complement the historical ERS-2 - ENVISAT water level series over rivers. We have processed the SARAL measurements (ICE-1 ranges) over the Amazon and Congo basins to produce more than 400 time series over a large variety of rivers, in particular in terms of reach width. In the Amazon basin we compare these series with gauge series. In both basins, we take advantage of the crossings at 1.5 day intervals to perform a SARAl-SARAL comparison, same as the one first presented for ENVISAT in Silva et al. (RSE, 2010). Last, taking advantage of the absolute levelling of 40 gauges that we performed by GPS in the Amazon basin, we propose updated values for the absolute biais of SARAL-ICE1 measurements and the relative bias between SARAL and ENVISAT (ICE-1 ranges for both).