Jun 9, 2026
NASA’s Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) is pleased to announce the public release of the NASA-SSH Sea Surface Height from Standardized Reference Missions Version 1.1 produced by NASA. This is an update from the previous Version 1. The datasets are produced from observations of sea surface height from the radar altimeter satellites in the reference mission orbits, including TOPEX/Poseidon, the Jason series, and Sentinel-6. All missions have been referenced to a common baseline, additional quality control has been performed, and errors with wavelengths around one orbital cycle have been reduced. In this update, all missions rely on JPL-produced orbits based on GNSS measurements, whenever available. More information regarding NASA-SSH is available from the NASA-SSH mission page.
The two datasets are: the Along-Track Sea Surface Height and Simple Gridded Sea Surface Height. The datasets both cover the global ocean up to the most poleward extent of the reference mission orbits (about 66 degrees latitude). The data begin in October 1992 and continue through the present.
The Along-Track Sea Surface Height dataset provides sea surface height geolocated along the satellite track, collected approximately once per second (1 Hz) and parsed into daily files.
The Simple Gridded Sea Surface Height dataset provides sea surface height anomaly on a 0.5-degree grid once every 7 days, consisting of 10 days worth of observations that cover approximately 1 complete cycle from the reference missions.
Files for both the Along-Track and Simple Gridded datasets are distributed in netCDF4 format.
The datasets are described and discoverable via Earthdata Search and the following DOIs:
Comments/Questions? Please contact podaac@podaac.jpl.nasa.gov or visit the Earthdata Forum.
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