Operational News

27.03.2019 [SSALTO/DUACS] Jason-3 back in the NRT system as the reference mission

A few weeks ago, the Jason-3 acquisition was stopped due to a safe-hold mode (SHM) event. The event itself was processed swiftly by the operations teams, and the ongoing Cal/Val investigations now report nominal quality metrics and no significant impact beyond the short interruption itself.

Because Jason-3 is the so-called reference altimeter in the multi-mission system DUACS (CMEMS Sea-Level TAC), the temporary unavailability called for an emergency procedure in the NRT system. The procedure uses a temporary anchor altimeter (here: Sentinel-3A) to stabilize the NRT system until the reference altimeter is back in operations.

Because the anchor is not a reference altimeter, the system slowly drifts away from what would have been produced with the reference altimeter (particularly in NRT). Now that Jason-3 has collected enough measurements after the SHM event, the drift was estimated. As expected it is small thanks to the good quality of Sentinel-3A, but not zero.

The procedure to seamlessly (no offset) reduce the drift to zero and to switch back to Jason-3 as the reference altimeter will be executed over this week where the system will be in a nominal status (no bias in the system).

All efforts are made to make this transition invisible to the CMEMS & DUACS end-users.

Please feel free to report any suspicious finding you might have during this period.[more]

14.03.2019 Planned outage on Extraction service and TDS Saturday March 16th

Due to a planned outage, AVISO Extraction service and TDS (Opendap) are going to be unavailalble Saturday March 16th between 8h UTC and 15h UTC.[more]

13.03.2019 Wind/Wave gridded products production recovery

There were problems on the 3 satellites used to compute wind/wave maps : Jason-3 in Safe Hold Mode, Jason-2 also and Saral/AltiKa with strong problems.

All this leaded to a stop in the processing of those products. Since  March 11th, there are some maps which are produced but they only content OGDR data of Jason-3. As from March 12th, IGDR data of Jason-3 will be introduced.

Jason-2 and Saral have still some problems, so the date to reintroduce them it is not planned yet. [more]

07.03.2019 [Jason-3] Jason-3 instruments have been restarted successfully

Jason-3 instruments have been restarted successfully on Wednesday, March, 6th, in cycle 113, pass 62 :

POSEIDON at 08:40:40UTC AMR at 08:42:10UTC GPSPB at 08:43:20UTC.

The first telemetry from the satellite was available around 11UTC : OGDRs are now generated normally.[more]

05.03.2019 February 2019: New version of L2P Non Time Critical Sentinel-3A products

The new version 02_01 is disseminated by AVISO+ via ftp or AVISO+ CNES Data Center (see the product sheet) with unchanged access (available in version_02_01 folder).

Note that the last cycle produced in version 02_00 has already been delivered (cycle 39). The next cycle 40 will be produced only in version 02_01. The version 01_00 will be removed from the ftp site. 

With this new version:

the input data are the “spring 2018 reprocessed” version of input NTC L2 products fully detailed in the EUMETSAT S3A STM reprocessing technical note the retracking version is homogeneous for all the cycles the standards are the same as in 02_00 version the temporal coverage of L2P versions and L2 baseline used are:

  S3A L2P NTC version 02_01 S3A L2P NTC version 02_00 S3A L2P NTC version 01_00 temporal coverage 15/06/2016 → present 15/06/2016 → 02/01/2018 15/06/2016 → 02/01/2018 based on L2 baseline collection 003 002 (till 17/11/2017) and 003 afterwards 002

 You will find the details in the handbook [more]

28.02.2019 [SSALTO/Duacs] Impact of Jason-3 unavailability in the NRT system

The DUACS system is facing an important reduction of upstream altimeter measurements. [more]

27.02.2019 [Wind/Wave products] temporary interruption of merged production since February 27th 2019

Due to the interruption of upstream measurements: Jason-3, Jason-2 and Saral/Altika, the merged wind and wave products cannot be processed since today February 27th 2019. 

We are sorry for the inconvenience[more]

25.02.2019 [Jason-3] Jason-3 in Safe Hold Mode since Feb 24th 09:57:16TU

On Sunday, February 24th, at 09:57:16TU, the Jason-3 spacecraft entered safe hold mode, immediately interrupting its measurements due to an important mispointing.[more]

19.02.2019 [Saral/AltiKa] SARAL/AltiKa satellite encountered since 3rd of February 2019 some issues affecting the nadir pointing accuracy

SARAL/AltiKa satellite encountered since 3rd of February 2019 some issues affecting the nadir pointing accuracy[more]

18.02.2019 [Jason-2] Jason-2 is in safe mode since Saturday, February 16th 2019 @14:56:48 UTC

The Jason-2 spacecraft entered safe mode Saturday, February 16th 2019 @14:56:48 UTC immediately interrupting its measurements. [more]