CoAuthors

The Cryo-TEMPO consortium (Lancaster University, UK); Jerome Bouffard (ESA, Italy); Alessandro di Bella (ESA, Italy)

After more than 11 years in orbit, CryoSat-2 has provided a decade of measurements with which to monitor and understand our changing planet. With its unique orbit and payload, not only has CryoSat-2 far exceeded its primary mission objectives over both land and sea ice, but it has also delivered scientific and methodological advances across a diverse range of applications. To date, many of these advances have been made by altimetry experts, using the standard Level-2 or lower-level products distributed by ESA’s ground segment. Typically, higher-level products have been limited to gridded datasets, where the native 20 Hz measurements have been averaged in space and time. Following consultations with the wider community, it has become increasingly clear that there is significant untapped value that can be realised by expanding the user-base beyond the traditional altimeter expert. Crucially, this requires simplified, agile and state-of-the-art thematic products, that deliver an easy-to-use dataset whilst maintaining the native along-track sampling of the original Level-2 products. Thus, ESA has embarked on a new path towards developing CryoSat-2 Thematic Products, which aim to rapidly expand the existing user base and thereby drive further innovation and exploitation.

Here, we present the latest results from Cryo-TEMPO, a 3-year ESA-funded study that began in October 2020 with the goal of delivering a new era of innovative CryoSat-2 Thematic Products over five domains; land ice, sea ice, polar ocean, coastal ocean and inland water. The over-arching objectives of Cryo-TEMPO are (1) to implement dedicated, state-of-the-art processing algorithms over each thematic domain, (2) to develop agile, adaptable processing workflows, that are capable of rapid evolution and processing at high cadence, (3) to create products that are driven by, and aligned with, user needs; thereby opening up the data to new communities of non-altimetry experts, and (4) to deliver transparent and traceable uncertainties associated with each thematic parameter. In this presentation we shall provide an overview of the project, a review of the first generation of these thematic products, and a look forward to the evolutions that are being implemented within the second phase of the study.