Basic Radar Altimetry Toolbox (BRAT) and its Applications for Cryosphere
Lucas, Bruno1; Rosmorduc, Vinca2; Niemeijer, Sander3; Dinardo, Salvatore4; Bronner, Emilie5; Benveniste, Jerome6
1ESA/ESRIN (Deimos), ITALY; 2CLS, FRANCE; 3S&T, NETHERLANDS; 4ESA/ESRIN (Serco), ITALY; 5CNES, FRANCE; 6ESA, 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. The software is able:
- to read most distributed radar altimetry data, from ERS-1 & 2, Topex/Poseidon, Geosat Follow-on, Jason-1, Envisat, Jason- 2, CryoSat and the future Saral missions,
- to perform some processing, data editing and statistic, and
- to visualize the results.

It can be used at several levels/several ways:
- as a data reading tool, with APIs for C, Fortran, Matlab and IDL
- as processing/extraction routines, through the on-line command mode
- as an educational and a quick-look 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.

BRAT has been available from April 2007, and had been demonstrated during training courses and scientific meetings. More than people downloaded it (beginning of 2013), with many "newcomers" to altimetry among them.

BRAT is available at http://earth.esa.int/brat/

Examples and Data use cases on Cryosphere, focusing on Cryosat and Envisat will be presented in the poster.