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NASA's Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) is pleased to announce the initial release of datasets from the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich/Jason CS radar altimeter mission, which aims to provide high-precision measurements of global sea-level that build upon the extensive record of observations from the previous Jason series altimetry missions.

This release includes the low resolution (LR) ocean surface topography measurements and the associated level 1B (L1B) and level 2 (L2) measurements from the Poseidon-4 (P4) altimeter and the Advanced Microwave Radiometer (AMR-C). Precise orbit determination (POD) tracking data from each of the two active Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers, the primary GNSS-POD and secondary GNSS-RO-POD, are also included in this release.

Validation is complete for the Near Real Time (NRT) and Short Time Critical (STC) datasets. The data in this release are available with a start date of 22 June 2021 0900 UTC (referenced to the data acquisition time), establishing the official start of the published data record. Future acquisitions will be accessible to users immediately after delivery to PO.DAAC. The NRT and STC datasets are delivered approximately 3 and 36 hours after acquisition, respectively. The high rate (HR) and Non-Time Critical (NTC) datasets are still undergoing validation.

L2 altimetry datasets are provided in “standard” and “reduced” forms. Both include Sea Surface Height Anomaly (SSHA), Significant Wave Height (SWH), and Wind Speed data. Standard datasets include both 1 Hz and 20 Hz measurements from the P4 radar altimeter, orbit altitude, environmental range corrections, instrument corrections, and geophysical models.

Differences between the data formats distributed from EUMETSAT and PO.DAAC are described on the Sentinel-6 mission page on the PO.DAAC Web Portal.

Datasets in this release are listed below by their digital object identifiers (doi.org), which redirect to the corresponding dataset pages on the PO.DAAC Web Portal.

L2 P4 Altimeter Low Resolution (LR) Ocean Surface Topography

• https://doi.org/10.5067/S6AP4-2LSNR (NRT, standard)
• https://doi.org/10.5067/S6AP4-2LSST (STC, standard)
• https://doi.org/10.5067/S6AP4-2LRNR (NRT, reduced)
• https://doi.org/10.5067/S6AP4-2LRST (STC, reduced)

L2 Advanced Microwave Radiometer (AMR-C) Geophysical Parameters

• https://doi.org/10.5067/S6AMW-2NRTF (NRT)
• https://doi.org/10.5067/S6AMW-2STCF (STC)

L1B GNSS Tracking Data

• https://doi.org/10.5067/S6AGN-1PODH (GNSS-POD, hourly)
• https://doi.org/10.5067/S6AGN-1PODD (GNSS-POD, daily)
• https://doi.org/10.5067/S6AGN-1ROPD (GNSS-RO-POD, ~every 2 hours)

L1B P4 Altimeter Low Resolution (LR) Geolocated Waveforms

• https://doi.org/10.5067/S6AP4-1BLST (STC)
• https://doi.org/10.5067/S6AP4-1BLNT (NTC)

Citation

Please cite the datasets according to this template when used in future publications:

Ocean Surface Topography Science Team. 2021. <Dataset Title>. PO.DAAC, CA, USA. Dataset accessed [YYYY-MM-DD] at https ://doi.org/10.5067/<DOI Suffix>

Resources for accessing Sentinel-6 MF data from PO.DAAC through the Earthdata Cloud archive in Amazon Web Services (AWS):

• Scripted Access to PO.DAAC Data in the Cloud
  • Video Tutorial - this video tutorial and accompanying data subscriber script provide a user guide on scripted access to PO.DAAC data in the Earthdata Cloud. Users are free to use it as a building block, and modify it for use with Sentinel-6 MF data. 
  • Data subscriber - example script on how to download data given a PO.DAAC collection short name.
• Additional data tutorials and examples can be found on the PO.DAAC Github.
• PO.DAAC Cloud Data Pages - new centralized location that is a key source for all information about cloud data access and resources, including Sentinel-6 MF. More resources are continuously being added.

Comments/Questions? Please contact podaac@podaac.jpl.nasa.gov or visit the PO.DAAC Sentinel-6MF Forum.