Demo Products

COASTALT was a Project on "Development of Radar Altimetry Data Processing in the Coastal Zone" funded by the European Space Agency (ESA/ESRIN contract 21201/08/I-LG) whose main objective was to contribute to the transition of pulse-limited coastal altimetry towards a mature, pre-operational status , by defining and testing new coastal radar altimeter products. This is ultimately to prepare the way for a routine generation and distribution of such products by ESA, first from the RA-2 altimeter on board Envisat but then also from the instruments on ERS-1 and ERS-2 (and now also Cryosat-2, plus Sentinel-3 in the future).

As part of the Jason-2 project, CNES is funding a dedicated initiative called PISTACH to improve conventional satellite radar altimetry products over coastal areas and continental waters.

A merged altimeter wave height data base has been set up by Ifremer, providing wave height, backscatter coefficient and wind speed.

Murray Brown from the UNESCO/IOC Intergovernmental Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange's (IODE) OceanTeacher program has developed an online tutorial using GlobWave data. The lesson teaches users how to access the GlobWave portal and download Near Real Time (NRT) ENVISAT and JASON 1&2 Altimeter data, open the netCDF files using the Integrated Data Viewer and display multiple datasets of altimeter point data with a range of visualisations.

The German Aerospace Center (DLR) have recently published their work on Global Sea State Measurements using ENVISAT ASAR Wave Mode Data.

The DUE eSurge project has been set up by ESA to promote the use of Earth Observation data for Storm Surge applications. A storm surge is an abnormally high sea level produced by severe atmospheric conditions, lasting for a period ranging from a few minutes to a few days. Storm surges can be extremely destructive, causing extensive flooding, severe damage to property and infrastructure, and in extreme cases significant loss of life. For example, most fatalities during tropical storms are due to the associated storm surges.

These types of plots are widely used in fatigue calculations in offshore engineering applications.

Fireworks consists of swell tracking animations of SAR observed swell snapshots at several successive dates from observations back or forward in time after simple linear wave propagation.

The SOPRANO demonstration product consists of a grid of SAR wave spectra extracted from a subset of a full SAR image. It also contains significant wave height and dominant wavelength and direction for the three most energetic wave partitions detected in each SAR wave spectrum.