What AVISO/Altimetry is

The AVISO/Altimetry center, in Toulouse, France, is the French Active Archive Data Center for multi-satellite altimeter missions. Its first task is to serve the U.S./French TOPEX/POSEIDON mission (satellite launched on August 1992). Our main activities today are:

• post-processing, analyzing, archiving and distributing level-2 altimeter data (full GDRs) from TOPEX/POSEIDON,
• processing and distributing level>2 altimeter products (easy-to-use for ocean scientists) such as Corrected Sea Surface Heights and Sea Level Anomalies (available for TOPEX/POSEIDON and ERS-1),
• accessing the quality and validating TOPEX/POSEIDON and ERS-1/ERS-2 altimetry,
• providing newsletters, handbooks, this WWW server, leaflets, videos, etc. to promote AVISO/Altimetry and the missions it serves,
• providing technical and science expertise through a user help desk.

AVISO/Altimetry may also serve future missions such as GEOSAT FOLLOW ON, ENVISAT, TOPEX/POSEIDON FOLLOW ON. As time goes by, our work will be increasingly to generate and distribute homogeneous long-term data series from muti-satellite altimeter missions.

AVISO/Altimetry was developed by CNES, the French Space Agency,

with assistance from its subsidiary CLS and science teams

involved in altimetry. It is run by CLS.

Besides AVISO/Altimetry, CLS has been responsible for:

• designing and running the DORIS-POSEIDON Processing Center,
• helping to define, develop and validate the altimeter processing algorithms,
• developing the TOPEX/POSEIDON Quick-Look system (results after first six months).