Lee-Lueng Fu (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, United States); Bruce Haines (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, United States)

SWOT aims to resolve smaller mesoscale SSH down to O(10 km). SSH on these scales is of small amplitude (<1 cm), which results in challenges in reconstructing the ground truth at such high accuracy for the SSH calibrate and validate (CalVal). The mission has conducted several in-situ field campaigns to evaluate the capability of different in-situ instruments and platforms for CalVal purposes. A recent field campaign was conducted in the open ocean 300km east of Monterey Bay, California between Sep/2019 and Jan/2020 (Figure). Here we report the main findings and conclusions from this field campaign. We concluded that a feasible plan for the SWOT-ocean CalVal field campaign includes an array of CTD moorings with profilers (Prawler/WireWalker) sampling the upper ocean and several gliders sampling the cross-swath direction and as a contingency for any failed mooring.