CryoSat User Workshop 1

CryoSat mission will reach its 6th years of operational life in April 2016. Since its launch, it has delivered high quality products to the worldwide cryospheric and marine community that is increasing every year. Scope of this paper is to describe the current mission status and programmatic highlights on the next scientific development of the mission in its extended period of operations.

The CryoSat-2 spacecraft is one of the Opportunity missions of the ESA Living Planet programme. It is currently operated by the European Space Operations Centre, in Darmstadt.  The Mission objective is to provide a global continuous measurements of the ice cover variations on the Polar caps and continental ice sheets plus other areas of land ice which is being achieved thanks to the use of its multi-mode interferometer radar, SIRAL. Additionally, CryoSat-2 data is being used to support the Oceanography community with respect to the long term sea level monitoring.

In April 2016, Cryosat-2 will have achieved six years of operations, covering six-months of commissioning and the follow on routine operations, including the completion of the nominal mission and the start of the extended routine phase. Overall, the mission has proven to be very successful and the spacecraft overall performance very reliable.

This paper first provides an overview of the CryoSat-2 current status, including the currently “active” anomalies, i.e. those which have not already been solved on-board, and their potential impact on the mission. A brief explanation of the satellite operations performed in the routine phase will be provided. Special operations in support of the mission performance and characterisation and also as a consequence of anomalies will be presented. An outlook on the future of the satellite will be presented with respect to the operations concept, i.e. which activities are already being performed to mitigate the aging of the satellite in order to ensure the mission continuation throughout the mission extension phase and beyond.

In order to support the further continuation of the mission a number of changes to the ground segment have also been initiated. These will be described, including the methods used to mitigate impact of the changes of the ground segment on the satellite operations and also the benefit that these changes will bring to the longevity of the mission.

In this presentation the status of the CryoSat 2 PDGS operations is given, detailing data acquistion, data processing, mission planning and data dissemination performance. In addition an overview will be given on the currently available product types, their latency and the way to access them. Another part of the presentation will focus on planned upgrades and their impact on service availability to users.

Over the past 20 years, satellite radar altimetry has shown its ability to revolutionize our understanding of the ocean and climate. These advances were mainly limited to ice-free regions, leaving aside large portions of Polar Regions. Launched in 2010, the polar-orbiting CryoSat Satellite is the first SAR/SARin altimeter concept to be flown on Earth, specifically designed to measure the changes in the thickness of polar sea-ice and the elevation of the ice sheets and mountain glaciers. Going beyond and above its ice-monitoring objective, CryoSat is also a valuable source of data for the oceanographic community. To enable their full scientific and operational exploitation, the CryoSat ice and ocean products have to meet the highest performance, through regular upgrades of the associated Instrument Processing Facilities. In this respect, the operational data need to be thoroughly quality-controlled and validated, via science-oriented diagnostics, robust statistics and comparisons with external measurements. Based on the outcomes from these analyses and the feedback from the Scientific Community, the data products continuously evolve in order to accommodate a wide range of users over the Sea ice, the Land Ice and the Ocean domains. The main objectives of this paper are to give an overview of the operational CryoSat data characteristics, quality status and to discuss potential way of improvements for future CryoSat processing Baselines.

CryoSat validation activities have been on-going since 2003 and play an
important role in the success of the mission and the science it supports. The
overall objective of all CryoSat validation activities is to assess and
quantify uncertainty in the CryoSat measurements of sea ice thickness and
land ice thickness change. The principal means for carrying out this program
is through dedicated, independent, ground-based and airborne campaigns along
with detailed investigations of retrieval methods applied to the satellite
measurements.
These validation activities are not carried out in isolation by the Agency,
but instead rely on collaboration with the roughly 40 international principal
investigators (PIs) in Europe, North America, Asia and Australia/NZ which
were recruited through 2 announcement of opportunities in 2001 and 2007. The
team of PIs - usually referred to the CryoSat validation and retrieval team
or CVRT - has supported ESA in
- elaborating details of coordinated and comprehensive calval strategy
- contributing directly to calval efforts
- providing feedback on calval results through workshops, meetings and
dedicated studies
The presentation will provide an entertaining overview of CryoSat calval
field activities including the context for calibration and validation and
selected achievements as well as requirements for future work.