Ocean Surface reconstruction from the synergy of Sentinel-3 sensors

Abstract:

Along-track altimetric measurements of Sea Surface Heights (SSH) are very well suited to quantify across-track currents. However, the spatial resolution of derived 2D velocities is restricted to scales above 100-150 km and the limited number of altimeters can lead to errors in the location of currents. On the contrary, infrared measurements of Sea Surface Temperature (SST) are well suited to locate flow patterns but it is difficult to extract quantitative estimations of ocean currents. During the last years, some works began to exploit the synergy of SST and altimetry measurements in order to retrieve ocean currents.

Nevertheless, all this previous works employed measurements which were near in time but not simultaneous. In that sense, Sentinel-3 is a multi-instrument mission that will circumvent this temporal limitation, providing simultaneous measurements of SST and altimetry with high-end accuracy and reliability. Our approach, based on the spectral properties of simultaneous SST and SSH observations, is tested using ENVISAT (RA, AATSR) data, since its geometry is similar to that of Sentinel-3 (SRAL, SLSTR).