RECOMMENDATIONS from the 6th Coastal Altimetry workshop

Recommendations from the 6th Coastal Altimetry Workshop

"The community of coastal altimetry scientists and users who convened in Riva del Garda for the 6^thCoastal Altimetry Workshop on 20/21 September 2012 recommends that:

1. coordinated effort should be put into generating and distributing a harmonized, well-documented  multi-mission coastal altimetry product calibrated to common standards and tailored to end-users, to foster the uptake of those data for improved analysis and prediction of coastal ocean circulation. This effort should include a reprocessing of the existing ~20 year record from past missions, a portal for data access and information sharing;
2. further R&D should be invested towards improving the techniques for processing, interpretation and cal/valof altimetry data in the coastal zone, including a full exploitation of the new opportunities offered by SAR altimetry and Ka-band altimetry. The in situ and modelling communities need to be engaged in this process;
3. level 1 data should be made easily available as the foundation of further R&D and the basis for reprocessing since significant progress can only be made by going back to full bit rate data;
4. every effort should be made to maximize the sampling and information content of future altimetric missions, which is particularly important for coastal zone applications. To this purpose, the adoption of the interleaved mode for Jason-CS is strongly recommended as it will also benefit retrospectively previous SAR missions;
5. in order to improve the precision and resolution of the data for all ocean applications, the area of Sentinel-3 SAR altimeter acquisition over the ocean should be maximized."

(unanimously approved in Riva, 21 Sept  2012)