| Summary: |
The main objective of the sea level CCI project is to produce and validate a Sea Level Essential Climate Variable (ECV) product. To achieve this global goal, the specific objectives for the Sea Level ECV are: - To involve the Climate research community - To develop, test and select the best algorithms and standards - Assess and collect information on the quality and error characteristics - Provide a complete specification of the operational production system In phase 2 of the project the UPorto team is responsible for WP 2400 - Wet tropospheric correction. The UPorto contribution is mainly in WP2310 - GNSS-derived path delay (GPD) wet troposphere corrections (for coastal products, for all missions) and in WP 2410 - Improvement of radiometer wet troposphere corrections. The aim is to provide improved WTC for eight altimetric missions used in the generation of Sea level ECV V2.0 (ERS-1, ERS-2, Envisat, TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason-1, Jason-2, CryoSat-2, SARAL/AltiKa), with focus on the long-term stability of the corrections. Since the WTC is still one of the largest sources of uncertainty in satellite altimetry, due to its large spatio-temporal variability, these WTC play a major role in the ECV generation. Moreover, in this phase of the project, the goal was to reduce the long-term uncertainty of the correction, by ensuring a proper inter-calibration of the WTC for the various altimetric missions. |