NOC C-BRE v1.0 L2 Data Released

Cartographic plot showing C-BRE v0.5 and C-BRE v1.0 data availability (NOC 2019)

During an ESA-sponsored study in 2018-2019, Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) and the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) have been collaborating to improve the L1B to L2 inversion accuracy for TDS-1 data.

The output of this work is an upgraded Calibrated Bistatic Radar Equation (C-BRE) processor (v1.0). This algorithm has been integrated into MERRByS and used to re-process the back catalogue of TDS-1 measurements.

The improvements over C-BRE v0.5 include:

  • Application of dual on-board / Antarctic radiometric calibration, increasing data coverage
  • An ice detection algorithm allowing data up to ice edges, and a new flag for presence of ice
  • Improved corrections for variation in GPS transmit powers
  • Improved flagging of processor and RFI anomalies

The data is available from the MERRByS FTP server in the data folder labelled “L2_CBRE_v1_0”. This folder can be found here.

An updated product manual describing the new C-BRE v1.0 Level 2 outputs can be found on the documentation page.