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In 2018 we celebrated 25 years of development of radar altimetry, and the progress achieved by this methodology in the fields of global and coastal oceanography, hydrology, geodesy and cryospheric sciences. Many symbolic major events have celebrated these developments, e.g., in Venice, Italy, the 15th (2006) and 20th (2012) years of progress and more recently, in 2018, in Ponta Delgada, Portugal, 25 Years of Progress in Radar Altimetry. On this latter occasion it was decided to collect contributions of scientists, engineers and managers involved in the worldwide altimetry community to depict the state of altimetry and propose recommendations for the altimetry of the future. This paper summarizes contributions and recommendations that were collected and provides guidance for future mission design, research activities, and sustainable operational radar altimetry data exploitation. Recommendations provided are fundamental for optimizing further scientific and operational advances of oceanographic observations by altimetry, including requirements for spatial and temporal resolution of altimetric measurements, their accuracy and continuity. There are also new challenges and new openings mentioned in the paper that are particularly crucial for observations at higher latitudes, for coastal oceanography, for cryospheric studies and for hydrology. The paper starts with a general introduction followed by a section on Earth System Science including Ocean Dynamics, Sea Level, the Coastal Ocean, Hydrology, the Cryosphere and Polar Oceans and the “Green” Ocean, extending the frontier from biogeochemistry to marine ecology. Applications are described in a subsequent section, which covers Operational Oceanography, Weather, Hurricane Wave and Wind Forecasting, Climate projection. Instruments’ development and satellite missions’ evolutions are described in a fourth section. A fifth section covers the key observations that altimeters provide and their potential complements, from other Earth observation measurements to in situ data. Section 6 identifies the data and methods and provides some accuracy and resolution requirements for the wet tropospheric correction, the orbit and other geodetic requirements, the Mean Sea Surface, Geoid and Mean Dynamic Topography, Calibration and Validation, data accuracy, data access and handling (including the DUACS system). Section 7 brings a transversal view on scales, integration, artificial intelligence, and capacity building (education and training). Section 8 reviews the programmatic issues followed by a conclusion.

In this paper, we explore different prognostic methods to account for skin sea surface temperature diurnal variations in a coupled ocean–atmosphere regional model of the Mediterranean Sea. Our aim is to characterise the sensitivity of the considered methods with respect to the underlying assumption of how the solar radiation shapes the warm layer of the ocean. All existing prognostic methods truncate solar transmission coefficient at a warm-layer reference depth that is constant in space and time; instead, we implement a new scheme where this latter is estimated from a chlorophyll dataset as the e -folding depth of solar transmission, which thus allows it to vary in space and time depending on seawater's transparency conditions. Comparison against satellite data shows that our new scheme, compared to the one already implemented within the ocean model, improves the spatially averaged diurnal signal, especially during winter, and the seasonally averaged one in spring and autumn, while showing a monthly basin-wide averaged bias smaller than 0.1 K year-round. In April, when most of the drifters' measurements are available, the new scheme mitigates the bias during nighttime, keeping it positive but smaller than 0.12 K during the rest of the monthly averaged day. The new scheme implemented within the ocean model improves the old one by about 0.1 K, particularly during June. All the methods considered here showed differences with respect to objectively analysed profiles confined between 0.5 K during winter and 1 K in summer for both the eastern and the western Mediterranean regions, especially over the uppermost 60 m. The new scheme reduces the RMSE on the top 15 m in the central Mediterranean for summertime months compared to the scheme already implemented within the ocean model. Overall, the surface net total heat flux shows that the use of a skin sea surface temperature (SST) parameterisation brings the budget about 1.5 Wm-2 closer to zero on an annual basis, despite all simulations showing an annual net heat loss from the ocean to the atmosphere. Our "chlorophyll-interactive" method proved to be an effective enhancement of existing methods, its strength relying on an improved physical consistency with the solar extinction implemented in the ocean component. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sea surface temperature (SST) is one of the essential variables of the Earth's climate system. Being at the air–sea interface, SST modulates heat fluxes in and out of the ocean, provides insight into several upper and interior ocean dynamical processes, and is a fundamental indicator of climate variability potentially impacting the health of marine ecosystems. Its accurate estimation and regular monitoring from space is therefore crucial. However, even if satellite infrared/microwave measurements provide much better coverage than what is achievable from in situ platforms, they cannot sense the sea surface under cloudy and rainy conditions. Large gaps are present even in merged multi-sensor satellite products, and different statistical strategies, mostly based on optimal interpolation (OI) algorithms, have thus been proposed to obtain gap-free (L4) images. These techniques, however, filter out the signals below the space–time decorrelation scales considered, significantly smoothing most of the small mesoscale and submesoscale features. Here, deep learning models, originally designed for single-image super resolution (SR), are applied to enhance the effective resolution of SST products and the accuracy of SST gradients. SR schemes include a set of computer vision techniques leveraging convolutional neural networks to retrieve high-resolution data from low-resolution images. A dilated convolutional multi-scale learning network, which includes an adaptive residual strategy and implements a channel attention mechanism, is used to reconstruct features in SST data at 1/100 ° spatial resolution starting from 1/16 ° data over the Mediterranean Sea. The application of this technique shows an improvement in the high-resolution reconstruction, capturing small-scale features and providing a root-mean-squared-difference improvement of 0.02 °C with respect to the L3 ground-truth data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sea surface temperature (SST) is one of the essential variables of the Earth climate system. Being at the interface with the atmosphere, SST modulates heat fluxes in and out of the ocean, provides insight on several upper/interior ocean dynamical processes, and it is a fundamental indicator of climate variability potentially impacting marine ecosystems' health. Its accurate estimation and regular monitoring from space is therefore crucial. However, even if satellite infrared/microwave measurements provide a much better coverage than what achievable from in situ platforms, they cannot sense the sea surface under cloudy/rainy conditions. Large gaps are present even in merged multi-sensor satellite products and different statistical strategies have thus been proposed to obtain gap-free (L4) images, mostly based on the Optimal Interpolation algorithms. This kind of techniques, however, filter out the signals below the space-time decorrelation scales considered, significantly smoothing most of the small mesoscale and submesoscale features. Here, deep learning models, originally designed for single image Super Resolution (SR), are applied to enhance the effective resolution of SST products and the accuracy of SST gradients. SR schemes include a set of computer vision techniques leveraging Convolutional Neural Networks to retrieve high-resolution data from low-resolution images. A dilated convolutional multi-scale learning network, which includes an adaptive residual strategy and implements a channel attention mechanism, is used to reconstruct features in SST data at 1/100° spatial resolution starting from 1/16° data over the Mediterranean Sea. The application of this technique shows a remarkable improvement in the high resolution reconstruction, being able to capture small scale features and providing a root-mean-squared-difference improvement of 0.02 °C with respect to the L3 ground-truth data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a study on the ocean surface currents reconstruction by merging Level-4 (L4, gap-free) altimeter-derived geostrophic currents and satellite sea surface temperature. Building upon past studies on the multi-variate reconstruction of geostrophic currents from satellite observations, we regionalized and optimized an algorithm to improve the altimeter-derived surface circulation estimates in the North Atlantic Ocean. A ten-year-long time series (2010–2019) is presented and validated by means of in situ observations. The newly optimized algorithm allowed us to improve the currents estimate along the main axis of the Gulf Stream and in correspondence of well-known upwelling areas in the North Eastern Atlantic, with percentage improvements of around 15% compared to standard operational altimetry products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we introduce a new high-resolution (1/10 °) data-driven dataset of 3D ocean currents developed by the National Research Council of Italy in the framework of the European Space Agency World Ocean Circulation project: the WOC-NATL3D dataset. The product domain extends over a wide portion of the North Atlantic Ocean from the surface down to 1500 m depth, and the dataset covers the period between 2010 and 2019. To generate this product, a diabatic quasi-geostrophic diagnostic model is applied to data-driven 3D temperature and salinity fields obtained through a deep learning technique, along with ERA5 fluxes and empirical estimates of the horizontal Ekman currents based on input provided by the European Copernicus Marine Service. The assessment of WOC-NATL3D currents is performed by direct validation of the total horizontal velocities with independent drifter estimates at various depths (0, 15 and 1000 m) and by comparing them with existing reanalyses that are obtained through the assimilation of observations into ocean general circulation numerical models. Our estimates of the ageostrophic components of the flow improve the total horizontal velocity reconstruction, being more accurate and closer to observations than model reanalyses in the upper layers, also providing an indirect proof of the reliability of the resulting vertical velocities. The reconstructed WOC-NATL3D currents are freely available at 10.12770/0aa7daac-43e6-42f3-9f95-ef7da46bc702. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we introduce a new high-resolution (1/10?) data-driven dataset of 3D ocean currents developed by the National Research Council of Italy in the framework of the European Space Agency World Ocean Circulation project: the WOC-NATL3D dataset. The product domain extends over a wide portion of the North Atlantic Ocean from the surface down to 1500 m depth, and the dataset covers the period between 2010 and 2019. To generate this product, a diabatic quasi-geostrophic diagnostic model is applied to data-driven 3D temperature and salinity fields obtained through a deep learning technique, along with ERA5 fluxes and empirical estimates of the horizontal Ekman currents based on input provided by the European Copernicus Marine Service. The assessment of WOC-NATL3D currents is performed by direct validation of the total horizontal velocities with independent drifter estimates at various depths (0, 15 and 1000 m) and by comparing them with existing reanalyses that are obtained through the assimilation of observations into ocean general circulation numerical models. Our estimates of the ageostrophic components of the flow improve the total horizontal velocity reconstruction, being more accurate and closer-to-observations than model reanalyses in the upper layers, also providing an indirect proof of the reliability of the resulting vertical velocities. The reconstructed WOC-NATL3D currents are freely available at https://www.worldocean circulation.org/Products#/metadata/0aa7daac-43e6-42f3-9f95-ef7da46bc702 (Buongiorno Nardelli, 2022). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS), a new operational MEDiterranean Diurnal Optimally Interpolated SST (MED DOISST) product has been developed. This product provides hourly mean maps (Level-4) of sub-skin SST at 1/16° horizontal resolution over the Mediterranean Sea from January 2019 to present. The product is built by combining hourly SST data from the Spinning Enhanced Visible and InfraRed Imager (SEVIRI) on board Meteosat Second Generation and model analyses through optimal interpolation. SEVIRI and model data are respectively used as the observation source and first-guess. The differences between satellite and model SST are free, or nearly free, of any diurnal cycle, thus allowing them to be interpolated in space and time using satellite data acquired at different times of the day. The accuracy of the MED DOISST product is assessed here by comparison against surface drifting buoy measurements, covering the years 2019 and 2020. The diurnal cycle reconstructed from DOISST is in good agreement with the one observed by independent drifter data, with a mean bias of 0.041 ± 0.001 K and root-mean-square difference (RMSD) of 0.412 ± 0.001 K. The new SST product is more accurate than the input model during the central warming hours, when the model, on average, underestimates drifter SST by one tenth of degree. The MED DOISST product is also able to reproduce accurately the extreme diurnal warming events frequently observed in the Mediterranean Sea, which may reach amplitudes larger than 5 K during the warm season. This product can contribute to improve the prediction capability of numerical weather forecast systems (e.g., through improved forcings/assimilation), as well as the monitoring of surface heat budget estimates and temperature extremes which can have significant impacts on the marine ecosystem. The full MED DOISST product (released on 04 May 2021) is available upon free registration at https://doi.org/10.25423/CMCC/SST%5FMED%5FPHY%5FSUBSKIN%5FL4%5FNRT%5F010%5F036 (Pisano et al., 2021). The reduced subset used here for validation and review purposes is openly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5807729 (Pisano, 2021). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]