Objectives

The Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) and Radar Altimeter (RA-2) instruments onboard ENVISAT will serve the user community with geophysical ocean wind and wave products extending the quality of previous and existing missions. To fully benefit the operational potential of these products, high quality calibration and validation measures (range of validity, bias, RMS errors, etc) must be established and routinely updated, and the results must be made available to the entire user

community. Combination of these measures with the original ESA ENVISAT products will provide the users with new and validated products beyond the quality of the original products. For previous European satellite missions such as ERS-1 and ERS-2 the lack of updated calibration/validation data sets has hampered the operational use of the data products and has even lead to products being degraded over the original ones.  Once validated products are available, value added products can be developed and assimilation into numerical weather and wave prediction models can be performed.

Figure 1: Example of collocated ocean wave spectra from WAM model, NOAA buoy and ASAR Wave Mode Level 2. The ASAR spectrum is processed from ERS Wave Mode data

The main objective of the project is in general terms to improve the usefulness of EO data within applied oceanography, ocean climatology, and meteorology by:

•           Developing new and validated ocean wind and wave products from the ENVISAT ASAR and RA-2 instruments beyond the quality of the corresponding ESA Level 2 products

•       Developing new assimilation techniques and demonstrating operational and a posteriori use in a wide range of ocean climates

•        Developing value added products by integrating validated satellite products, in-situ data, and numerical model outputs into new and existing higher-order ocean climate applications and products