Global Remote Sensing Daily Merged Multi-Mission Along-Track Significant Wave Height from Altimetry, L3 Product, Version 4, from ESA Sea State CCI

The ESA Sea State Climate Change Initiative (CCI) project has produced global daily merged multi-sensor time-series of along-track satellite altimeter significant wave height data (referred to as Level 3 (L3) 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. It has been generated from upstream Sea State CCI L2P products, edited and merged into daily products, retaining only valid and good quality measurements from all altimeters over one day, with simplified content (only a few key parameters). This is close to what is delivered in Near-Real Time by the CMEMS (Copernicus - Marine Environment Monitoring Service) project. It covers the date range from 1991-2023.

The altimeter data used in the Sea State CCI dataset v3 come from multiple satellite missions (ERS-1, ERS-2,TOPEX-Poseidon, Envisat, CryoSat-2, Jason-1, Jason-2, Jason-3, SARAL, Sentinel-3 A, Sentinel-3 B, Sentinel-6 A), therefore spanning over a wider time range than 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.