Numerical Performance of Jason-CS SARM
Martin-Puig, Cristina¹; Garcia-Mondéjar, Albert¹; Escolà, Roger²; Roca, Mònica^2
1isardSAT, SPAIN; ²isardSAT, POLAND

The Jason-CS (J-CS) mission will ensure continuity of service to the Jason family. It is intended to overlap with Jason-3 and complement the high inclination measurements of Sentinel-3 for the benefit of the marine and climate user communities. The mission will have on board the Poseidon-4 (P4) altimeter with heritage from Sentinel-3 SRAL, CryoSat-2 SIRAL and the previous Poseidon families Poseidon-2 (Jason-1), 3a (Jason-2) and 3b (Jason-3). P4 will have a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) altimeter on board, but for the first time acquisition modes will not be exclusive and SAR and pulse limited data will be gathered simultaneously.

The mission is built under ESA, EUMETSAT, NOAA, CNES and NASA partnership. ESA/ESTEC is responsible for the Jason-CS Space Segment, and the lead of this contract is at Astrium GmbH. Within this contract isardSAT is leading the P4 Ground Processor Prototype (GPP).

In the same spirit set by the SAR Altimetry MOde Studies and Applications (SAMOSA) project [Ref. 1] we aim at investigating the altimetric performance of the Jason-CS SAR Mode (SARM) over the Ocean with simulated data. A few Ocean scenarios will be processed by the adapted CryoSat Mission Performance Simulator (adapted-CRYMPS), then serve as input to the J-CS P4 GPP built at isardSAT and results will be retracked with the SARM L2 retracker at isardSAT inherited from the SAMOSA project [Ref. 2] and adapted to the J-CS mission. Innovative processing methodologies added for the first time to the J-CS P4 GPP will be tested and their impact at L2 investigated.

[Ref. 1] C. Gommenginger, C. Martin-Puig, S. Dinardo, R. K. Raney, P. David Cotton and J. Benveniste. On the altimetric performance of the sentinel-3 SAR-mode altimeter over the ocean: a numerical study. Poster presented at EGU 2010 General Assembly, Vienna, Austria, 2-7 May 2010.

[Ref. 2] C. Ray, C. Martin-Puig, M. P. Clarizia, G. Ruffini, S. Dinardo, C. Gommenginger and J. Benveniste. SAR Altimeter Backscattered Waveform Model. Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing