Blending 2D topography images from SWOT into the altimeter constellation with the Level-3 multi-mission DUACS system

Abstract

Abstract. The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission delivers unprecedented swath altimetry products. Despite SWOT’s 2D coverage and precision, its Level-2 products suffer from the same limitations as their counterparts from nadir altimetry missions. Level-2 products are designed in a standalone ground-segment to meet the mission’s primary science objectives. In contrast, some research domains and applications require consistent multi-mission observations such as the Level-3 products provided by the Data Unification and Altimeter Combination System (DUACS) for almost 3 decades, and with 20 different satellites. In this paper, we describe how we extended the Level-3 algorithms to handle SWOT’s unique swath-altimeter data. We also illustrate and discuss the benefits, relevance, and limitations of Level-3 swath-altimeter products for various research domains.

Internal tides off the Amazon shelf in the western tropical Atlantic: Analysis of SWOT Cal/Val Mission Data

“…We exclude SWOT nadir observation, to focus on the SWOT's potential to observe directly 2D maps of the ocean. The ssha_karin_2_filtered has been denoised using data-driven machine-learning noise reduction and corrected from all the classic physical, instrumental and environmental corrections applied in altimetry (Dibarboure et al 2024). The tidal corrections applied are FES2022 model (Lyard et al, personal communication;Lyard et al, 2021) for the barotropic tide and HRET for the internal tide (Zaron, 2019).…”