Polar Ocean dataset (Cryosat-2)

Arctic and Antarctic Cryosat-2 Polar dataset

The files contain the Cryosat-2 sea surface height data for the Arctic and Antarctic regions for the period 2010.5 until 2019.12.

Data can be used to study ocean tides or sea level variations. The data have been formatted for the use of tidal studies and have been used to derive the DTU23 ocean tide model (also available)

Processing and retracking of the Cryosat-2 data are described in the associated paper.

Data are processed to remove the DTU21MSS and the FES2014 elastic ocean tide signal. The processing is done on the full 20 Hz data on a track-by-track basis to allow extraction of sea surface height in leads. Each observation in the file represents the mean(ssh) and standard deviation for a crossing of a cell of size 0.5 latitude by 3.0 latitude.

The format is the following(given with a data example)

196 -57.126127 14.598178 805854109.666172 -0.046690 0.106288 -114 4 5

label, latitude, longitude, time sec from (01.01.1985 00:00i) average sea level, standard deviation of sea level,

The three indexes at the end are: box number (latitude), box number (long), and number of points averaged. Box latitude of -114 corresponds to the cell between -57.0 and -57.5 due to the 0.5 degree avearaging.

The dataset contains the combined Cryosat-2 dataset. This means both LRM,SAR and SARin data. Individual SAR/SIN/LRM datasets is also available in the same format by contact to the author.

The file c2data illustrate the amount of times valid averaged sea level observations are available for each geographical cell.