Ocean winds and waves, extreme events
Wind and wave measurement from active spaceborne sensors such as SAR, scatterometer or altimeter, is an major research topic at CERSAT, with a strong involvement into related ESA or CNES missions such as ERS, Envisat, CFOSat and Sentinel, and a particular focus on extreme events (storms and long swells).
Research and development activities at CERSAT mostly targets the following areas :
Support to satellite missions
- development of processing algorithms for wind and wave retrieval from SAR, scatterometer and altimeters
- involvement in the design and definition of future missions
- cal/val and long-term monitoring of existing instruments
- data processing and dissemination
- reprocessing of historical archives, such as Envisat and ERS SAR wave mode.
Advanced products
- dynamic high-level wave products derived from SAR observation, such the swell fireworks
- easy to use multi-mission homogeneous and consistent time series of wave measurements, like those developed in the frame of GlobWave project
- blended satellite and model products providing higher spatial and temporal resolution such as the QuikSCAT/ECMWF blended L4 products produced for MyOcean project
Detection and characterization of extreme events
- detection and tracking of storms and cross-sensor observation indexing.