Basic Radar Altimetry Toolbox: Tools to Teach Altimetry
Rosmorduc, Vinca1; Benveniste, Jerome2; Bronner, Emilie3; Niemeijer, Sander4; Dinardo, Salvatore5; Lucas, Bruno Manuel6
1CLS, FRANCE; 2ESA/ESRIN, ITALY; 3CNES, FRANCE; 4Science and Technology, NETHERLANDS; 5Serco/Esrin, ITALY; 6Deimos/Esrin, ITALY

The Basic Radar Altimetry Toolbox is an "all-altimeter" collection of tools, tutorials and documents designed to facilitate the use of radar altimetry data, including the next missions to be launched.
It has been available from April 2007, and had been demonstrated during training courses and scientific meetings. More than 2000 people downloaded it (January 2013), with many "newcomers" to altimetry among them. Users' feedbacks, developments in altimetry, and practice, showed that new interesting features could be added. Some have been added and/or improved in version 2 and 3. Others are in discussion for the future, including addition of the future Sentinel-3.

The Basic Radar Altimetry Toolbox is able:
- to read most distributed radar altimetry data, including the one from future/new missions like Saral,
- to perform some processing, data editing and statistic,
- and to visualize the results.

It can be used at several levels/several ways, including as an educational tool, with the graphical user interface.
As part of the Toolbox, a Radar Altimetry Tutorial gives general information about altimetry, the technique involved and its applications, as well as an overview of past, present and future missions, including information on how to access data and additional software and documentation. It also presents a series of data use cases, covering all uses of altimetry over ocean, cryosphere and land, showing the basic methods for some of the most frequent manners of using altimetry data.

Example from education uses will be presented, and feedback from those who used it as such will be most welcome.

BRAT is developed under contract with ESA and CNES. It is available at
http://www.altimetry.info and http://earth.esa.int/brat/