River and Lake from Radar Altimetry Sample Products for Hydrologists

Recent research in the application of altimetry for monitoring river and lakes levels showed the advantage of using data derived from satellite with a global coverage and repeated sampling in addition to ground data. The European Space Agency has initiated a "River and Lake" project to provide the scientific community with easy-to-use, effective and accurate river and lake height measurements from both ERS and ENVISAT satellite altimeters. De Montfort University (DMU, UK) has developed a system to obtain an estimation of the River and the Lake height from both ERS and ENVISAT data. The ambition is to obtain 10 years of data of worldwide coverage of large rivers and lakes and to make available to Hydrologists River and Lake height products in near real time, i.e., in less than 3 hours after the measurement. Sample data will be distributed on CD-ROM at the conference as well as tools to visualize them.