The Current Status of the Validation of MERIS and AATSR

This paper presents the ENVISAT mission status and data policy and reviews the end-to-end performance of the MERIS and AATSR observation systems and will discuss the validation aspects of these instruments In particular for each instrument the review addresses mission planning in-orbit performance calibration data processor algorithms and configuration reprocessing strategy and product quality control assessment An important part of the quality assessment is the Geophysical Validation At the MAVT Validation workshop held in Frascati Italy from 20-24 March 2004 scientists and engineers presented analyses of the exhaustive series of tests that have been run on each of ENVISAT MERIS and AATSR sensors since the spacecraft was launched in March 2002 This paper will discuss the general status of the validation activities related to Envisat and some results will be presented for the MERIS and AATSR sensors The flight and ground-segment planning configuration and performance characterization will be discussed The main and long-term geophysical validation program and some results will be presented