ERS reprocessing at CTOH for extended applications

The ERS altimetry data are historically distributed at level 2 only for open ocean applications. CTOH has used the ERS WAP data provided by ESA to develop its own processing chain. This processing adds the ice2 retracking and in-house corrections. We set up homogeneous and updated corrections for both ERS and ENVISAT including, for example, the tropospheric correction (blarel and legresy 2013), the doppler correction (blarel and legresy, 2012), and echo shape change corrections (legresy et al., 2006) making it compatible with altimetry applications out of the open ocean, including coastal altimetry, land ice, land hydrology and land surface monitoring. Here we show the first results of the reprocessing, with a comparison of the retracking outputs on the echo shape, namely Backscatter, Leading Edge Width, Trailing Edge Slope as defined in the Ice2 retracking (Legresy et al., 2005). We show maps of the results over the globe for both ERS2 and ENVISAT while they followed the same orbit at a 30 minute interval. We can observe the agreement and differences between both satellites measurements. We also show the results of validation on ERS and ENVISAT on an earlier version of the processing on limited areas exemplifying the interest for a number of applications. This dataset should be well adapted to non open-ocean applications and to compare to ESA’s ongoing reprocessing of ERS data (Reaper product).