A series of at-sea campaigns to calibrate and validate the Swot sea surface heights are ongoing. One of the Mediterranean Sea at-sea campaign was recently carried out, with interesting results to be compared with the Swot mission’s future data.

SST situation map of the FaSt-Swot campaign on April 21, 2023, with the two Swot wide-swaths (delimited by the white parallel lines) and the study area (white box) (Credit Imedea/Socib; SST data: EU Copernicus Marine Service)

Deployment plans for the 1st part of the at-sea campaign (MVP: Moving Vessel Profiler; CTD: conductivity-temperature-depth in situ sensors; Hereon, Carthe; Atalaia, SVP are different kind of drifting buoys). White dots represent the Swot “grid” under one of the wide swaths, overlaid on the SST map for April 26, 2023. (Credit Imedea/Socib; SST data: EU Copernicus Marine Service)

As mentioned in the Image of the Month of April 2023, some of the Swot “Adopt a crossover” campaigns are currently taking benefits of the 1-day orbit Calval phase of the mission to sample the ocean and help in validating the data.

An at-sea campaign just took place close to the Balearic Islands, “FaSt-Swot, leg1” campaign ( 25/04/2023 – 29/04/2023 ), led by Imedea (Instituto Mediterráneo de Estudios Avanzados) in coordination with Socib (Sistema de Observación Costero y de Predicción), both centers located in the Balearic Islands. During the cruise, a submesoscale eddy was pinpointed using several sensors (including the preliminary Swot images made in that aim). Different in situ instruments were deployed to sample this eddy at the highest possible resolution for comparison purposes with future Swot measurements collected during an ulterior mission phase.

The FaSt-SWOT project is funded by the Spanish Research Agency and the European Regional Development Fund (AEI/FEDER, UE) under Grant Agreement (PID2021-122417NB-I00).

See https://www.swot-adac.org/news/fast-swot-blog-tracking-a-small-eddy-under-swot-swath/

Contacts: Ananda Pascual, Baptiste Mourre