Nathan Kientz (alten, France); Pierre Prandi (CLS, France); François Bignalet-Cazalet (CNES, France); Nicolas Picot (CNES, France)

The SARAL mission was successfully launched on February 25th 2013. Its Ka-band altimeter and dual frequency radiometer have been delivering high quality sea surface topography measurements since. On July 4th, 2016 an orbit maneuver was performed to move the spacecraft to a new orbit where the satellite altitude is no longer maintained, starting the so-called drifting phase. Following the loss of one of the platform’s reaction wheels on September 13th 2014 and star tracker on February 3rd 2019, the pointing accuracy is degraded from 2019 onwards.

We present the current mission performance status of the SARAL/AltiKa mission over ocean, based on the analysis of the latest GDR version data (GDR-F).

The main objective of this study is to assess quality of the SARAL/AltiKa's product over the whole series. Several Cal/Val metrics are presented to document data availability and overall mission performance. Cross-comparisons with other altimetry missions show the still excellent performance of SARAL/AltiKa.

The aim of this work is also to provide an overview of SARAL/AltiKa’s data quality at different scales: climate, mesoscales, high latitudes...