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10th Coastal Altimetry Workshop; Florence, Italy, 21–24 February 2017

8th Coastal Altimetry Workshop; Konstanz, Germany, 23–24 October 2014

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) altimetry is rapidly becoming the most efficient way to measure small-scale changes in elevations of ice, land, and water surfaces as well as sea ice thickness. This new generation altimeter, first launched on board the CryoSat-2 satellite, fires 10 times more radar pulses per second than the previous generation and exploits the motion of the spacecraft to achieve a 20-fold increase in along-track resolution and twofold improvement in its accuracy.

The scientific community involved in the research and development of applications of satellite altimetry in the coastal zone met for the 6th Coastal Altimetry Workshop. Research in coastal altimetry is going through exciting times: Experimental data sets for the coastal zone are now available, such as those from the French PISTACH project for the Jason-2 satellite and from the European Space Agency (ESA)–funded COASTALT project for the Envisat satellite, and many diverse applications were shown at the workshop. These range from observing coastal currents to monitoring river and lake levels, ice margins, and storm surges to gravity mapping in coastal zones.

[1] Fourth Coastal Altimetry Workshop; Porto, Portugal, 14–15 October 2010; Satellite altimetry is now a mature Earth observation technique with great impact in many areas of study, including ocean circulation, marine geoid, bathymetry, and assimilation into models, as well as sea level trends and their impacts on the understanding of global climate change. Until recently, the centimeter-level accuracy achieved by this technique had been limited to open ocean about 50 kilometers off the coast. Aiming to develop products for coastal zones with an accuracy similar to that achieved in the open ocean, several research projects in the past few years, such as Prototype Innovant de Systeme de Traitement pour les Applications Cotieres et l'Hydrologie (PISTACH), Development of Radar Altimetry Data Processing in the Coastal Zone (COASTALT), Centre de Topographie des Oceans et de l'Hydrosphere (CTOH), and more recently the European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative (ESA CCI), have been supported by various agencies. In parallel, a set of Coastal Altimetry Workshops was initiated (Silver Spring, Md., 2008; Pisa, Italy, 2008; Frascati, Italy, 2009). The Fourth Coastal Altimetry Workshop followed on this successful series of workshops and was hosted by the University of Porto, with support mainly from ESA and 10 other institutions and space agencies.

Recognizing that coastal ocean observing systems would benefit from enhanced satellite altimetry, a first coastal altimetry workshop, held in Silver Spring, Md., in February 2008, charted the course to promote its use in the coastal zone (see W. H. Smith et al., Eos, 89(40), 380, 2008). A second workshop, hosted in Pisa, Italy, in November 2008, confirmed the rapid progress made in the field (see J. Benveniste and S. Vignudelli, Eos, 90(26), 225, 2009), especially by projects such as COASTALT (Development of Radar Altimetry Data Processing in the Coastal Zone), funded by the European Space Agency (ESA), and PISTACH (Prototype Innovant de Systeme de Traitement Pour les Applications Cotieres et l'Hydrologie), funded by Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES), France.

A growing number of coastal observing systems are incorporating altimeter data. This requires new methods to reduce errors caused by land in the radar footprints and inaccuracies in atmospheric and geophysical corrections near land. These issues are being addressed in individual research projects and by two major European initiatives. COASTALT (funded by the European Space Agency (ESA)) is developing processing tools for retrieving along-track altimeter data from the Envisat satellite in coastal regions, while Prototype Innovant de Systeme de Traitement pour l'Altimetrie Cotiere et l'Hydrologie (PISTACH, funded by Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES), France) is doing the same for data from the Jason 1 and 2 satellites. To coordinate these efforts, a second workshop on coastal altimetry was held in Italy to review progress since the first workshop (see W. H. Smith et al., Eos, 89(40), 380, 2008). The second workshop was sponsored by ESA and CNES together with Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (Italy) and the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (United Kingdom). Seventy-eight participants from 16 countries attended this workshop.