CERSAT activities and scatterometers value-added products

CERSAT is the French Processing and Archiving Facility for the satellites ERS-1 and ERS-2, launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 1991 and 1995 respectively. CERSAT was designed for ERS-1 low bit rate processing, specializing its activities in two main domains: Off-line processing for ERS radar altimeter (OPR) and micro-wave sounder (VLC) Off-line processing for AMI-WIND scatterometer (WNF). Through a close collaboration with the scientific team of the Department of Oceanography from Space, CERSAT started in 1995 the generation of value-added products generated from ERS off-line scatterometer data (WNF): a Mean Wind Fields atlas and a Sea-Ice atlas were generated on CDROMs and distributed to users. In 1996 Cersat started new activities using NSCAT and ERS data. NSCAT is a double swath scatterometer launched on ADEOS in august 1996 and unfortunately lost in June 1997. To continue after NSCAT, NASA will, in 1998, launch a new scatterometer QuikScat. CERSAT plans to provide the users with the same services as for NSCAT. Since June 1997 all the products provided by CERSAT are available on our WEB server (http://www.ifremer.fr/cersat) Through our demonstration you will be able to discover these products as well as: our WEB server ERS/NSCAT atlases generated at CERSAT.