Operational News

10.05.2019 [Saral/Altika] Cycle 127 GDR release

Dear SARAL/Altika users,

Please take note of the disclaimer below : 

GDR cycle 127 (04 February 2019-11 March 2019) was just released recently. During this cycle SARAL/AltiKa satellite regularly encountered mispointing events. The availability and the quality of data measurements continue to be degraded from time to time. CNES, EUMETSAT and ISRO inform users that removing any ocean data with “off_nadir_angle_wf” over 0.09 deg² will ensure a good data quality.

Detailled information about calval analysis is given in this page.

Quality assement report is available here.[more]

09.05.2019 Maintenance on the Aviso+ Web services on May 14th 2019 between 10h and 10h15 UTC

Due to a maintenace, the Aviso+ web sites will be disrupted on May 14th between 10h and 10h15 UTC. This will concern, the website, the Aviso+ extraction service, the TDS (Opendap), and the Live Access Server (LAS) [more]

26.04.2019 [Saral/Altika] Data quality : back to normal

Dear SARAL/Altika users, 

We are pleased to inform you that the quality of data is almost back to normal. Indeed, ISRO teams have improved the pointing stability thanks to new operational procedures.

Since April 19th 2019, the availability and the quality of data measurements are better (small time to time limited effects may anyway occur). Therefore, before using the data, Users are still invited to remove any ocean data with “off_nadir_angle_wf” over 0.09 deg²)[more]

18.04.2019 [Saral/AltiKa] Data information

Dear SARAL/Altika users,

 Please take note of the disclaimer below :

 SARAL/AltiKa satellite encounters since 3rd of February 2019 some issues affecting the nadir pointing accuracy. ISRO Operational Team in charge of the platform is doing many efforts to fix the issues and to recover a nominal mission as soon as possible.  

The availability and the quality of data measurements is degraded from time to time. Nevertheless, Cnes, EUMETSAT and ISRO have decided to continue the dissemination of the near real time and off-line products;  Therefore, before using the data, Users are invited to remove any ocean data with “off_nadir_angle_wf” over 0.09 deg²; otherwise standard quality flags may be used.

GDR cycle 126 (31 December 2018-04 February 2019 is just released today. It covers the beginning of the degraded period and you are encouraged to read the associated Cal/Val report available on AVISO+. In brief, during this cycle mispointing is quite larger than usual from pass 962 (03/02/2019 06:21:18 ) due to this attitude deviation. Hence a higher percentage of rejected measurements (up to  80%) is observed starting at pass 962. The attitude deviation also explains the higher percentage of missing measurements Users are advised not to use data with off_nadir_angle > 0.09deg².[more]

12.04.2019 [Jason-3] Jason-3 is back

This Morning, on a pass at 07:00UTC(i.e. on cycle 116, pass 246) all JASON-3 core mission instruments were restarted :

-POSEIDON at 07:16:24UTC

-AMR at 07:18:12UTC

-GPSPB at 07:20:01UTC

The first post-SHM mission telemetry has been delivered. First IGDRs will be Distributed on Monday April 15th.

[more]

09.04.2019 [Jason-3]The Jason-3 spacecraft entered safe mode on Saturday, April 6, 2019 at 23:17:22 UTC

The Jason-3 spacecraft entered safe mode on Saturday, April 6, 2019 at 23:17:22 UTC, immediately interrupting its measurements.

SEALEVEL j3 datasets in NRT are no longer updated with fresh data up to the recovery of the mission.

Investigation in progress on CNES side, the root cause has not yet been identified. [more]

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]