Global Remote Sensing Multi-Mission Along-Track Significant Wave Height from Altimetry, L2P Product, version 4 from ESA Sea State CCI

The ESA Sea State Climate Change Initiative (CCI) project has produced global multi-sensor time-series of along-track satellite altimeter significant wave height data (referred to as Level 2P (L2P) data) with a particular focus for use in climate studies.

This dataset contains the Version 4 Remote Sensing Significant Wave Height product, which provides along-track data at approximately 6 km spatial resolution, separated per satellite and pass, including all measurements with flags, bias corrections and extra parameters from other sources. These are expert products with rich content and no data loss.

The altimeter data used in the Sea State CCI dataset v4 come from multiple satellite missions spanning from 1992 to 2023 (ERS-1, ERS-2, Envisat, CryoSat-2, Jason-1, Jason-2, Jason-3, SARAL, Sentinel-3 A, Sentinel-3 B, Sentinel-6 A), therefore spanning over a larger time range than the previous version 3. The missions already retracked (with WHALES) in version 3 were not reprocessed, but extended when applicable. Many altimeters are bi-frequency (Ku-C or Ku-S) and only measurements in Ku band were used, for consistency reasons, being available on each altimeter but SARAL (Ka band).

The version 4 of this dataset now supersedes the previous version 3.