A demonstration of the potential of Cryosat-2 to contribute to mesoscale observation

Cryosat-2 was designed for its primary scientific objectives, i.e. for cryosphere science. As far as oceanography is concerned, various mission design choices make it less accurate than missions designed to comply with ocean surface topography requirements such as Jason-2 or ENVISAT. Cryosat-2-specific errors are equivalent to more than 50% of the sea surface height variability over 40% of the oceans. Cryosat-2’s sampling pattern is also suboptimal for mesoscale observation because the satellite tracks from any consecutive period of 2 to 20 days (e.g. the most recent and most valuable data for near real time mesoscale observation) are aggregated in 500 km wide bands which are interleaved with 500 km wide observation gaps.