Meteo upgrade and expected delayed delivery on Jason-2 IGDR

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25.03.2011 14:04 Age: 14 yrs

Meteo upgrade and expected delayed delivery on Jason-2 IGDR

Category: Operational news

An upgrade on meteo fields used for altimetry corrections is planned on March 29th 2011. Some impacts are expected.

We are pleased to announce an update of all altimetric processing chains, in order to bring the current spatial resolution of model-based atmospheric corrections, in line with the current native resolution of the ECMWF model used to derive them. The upgrade is planned to take place on March 29^th around 12:00 UTC. Since January 26^th 2010, the native resolution of the ECMWF atmospheric deterministic model used in the estimation of these corrections is of the order of 16 km. Interpolated grids down to 25 km have been used since in all operational altimetric processing chains. Impact studies have been carried out in the last few months for Jason-2 and Envisat products considering both resolutions, by looking specifically at the following parameters: wet tropospheric correction, dry tropospheric correction, U and V wind components, sea surface pressure and the Dynamic Atmospheric Correction. For Jason-2, the results on OGDR products indicate differences on the order of only tens of cm/s RMS on wind speed components, and less than 1 mm RMS for the range corrections. On IGDR and GDR products, where the Dynamic Atmospheric Correction is applied, we have observed additionally range differences of 3 mm RMS in shallow water areas. No impact has been observed in significant wave height. In conclusion, the scientific impact of this upgrade on all altimetric products is quite negligible. For Jason-2, the only expected impact for users is a delayed delivery of IGDR products on March 30^th. Jason-1 and ENVISAT IGDRs should be processed and delivered nominally.

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