CryoSat Mission over Polar Region: Data quality status and product evolutions

Over the past 20 years, satellite radar altimetry has shown its ability to revolutionize our understanding of the ocean and climate. These advances were mainly limited to ice-free regions, leaving aside large portions of Polar Regions. Launched in 2010, the polar-orbiting CryoSat Satellite was designed to measure the changes in the thickness of polar sea ice and the elevation of the ice sheets and mountain glaciers. To reach this goal, the CryoSat products have to meet the highest performance, through constant improvements of the associated Instrument Processing Facility. Since April 2015, the CryoSat ice products are generated with the Baseline C; which represents a major processor upgrade. Several improvements have been implemented belong this new Baseline, such as SAR retracker optimized for Freeboard retrieval and a coarse slant correction, which is applied directly on the stack data in conjunction with the window delay alignment. The resulting waveforms show more power and the trailing edge is modified, leading to improved L2 geophysical parameters. This paper provides an overview of the CryoSat data characteristics, assessment and exploitation over Polar Regions. In this respect, new science-oriented diagnostics have been implemented to thoroughly understand the signatures within the altimeter signals over sea-ice and land ice areas, to validate the data and therefore propose potential way of improvements for next CryoSat processing Baselines.