The Sentinel-3 Mission Performance Centre (S3MPC) is tasked by the European Space Agency (ESA) to monitor the health of the Copernicus Sentinel-3 satellites and ensure a high data quality to the users. This paper deals exclusively with the effort devoted to the altimeter and microwave radiometer, both components of the Surface Topography Mission (STM). The altimeters on Sentinel-3A and -3B are the first to operate in delay-Doppler or SAR mode over all Earth surfaces, which enables better spatial resolution of the signal in the along-track direction and improved noise reduction through multi-looking, whilst the radiometer is a two-channel nadir-viewing system. There are regular routine assessments of the instruments through investigation of telemetered housekeeping data, calibrations over selected sites and comparisons of geophysical retrievals with models, in situ data and other satellite systems. These are performed both to monitor the daily production, assessing the uncertainties and errors on the estimates, and also to characterize the long-term performance for climate science applications. This is critical because an undetected drift in performance could be misconstrued as a climate variation. As the data are used by the Copernicus Services (e.g., CMEMS, Global Land Monitoring Services) and by the research community over open ocean, coastal waters, sea ice, land ice, rivers and lakes, the validation activities encompass all these domains, with regular reports openly available. The S3MPC is also in charge of preparing improvements to the processing, and of the development and tuning of algorithms to improve their accuracy. This paper is thus the first refereed publication to bring together the analysis of SAR altimetry across all these different domains to highlight the benefits and existing challenges.

During its commissioning phase, the Copernicus Sentinel-3B satellite has been placed in a tandem formation with Sentinel-3A for a period of 6 months. This configuration allowed a direct comparison of measurements obtained by the two satellites. The purpose of this paper was to present the range of analyses that can be performed from this dataset, highlighting methodology aspects and the main outcomes for each instrument. We examined, in turn, the benefit of the tandem in understanding instrument operational modes differences, in assessing inter-satellite differences, and in validating measurement uncertainties. The results highlighted the very good consistency of the Sentinel-3A and B instruments, ensuring the complete inter-operability of the constellation. Tandem comparisons also pave the way for further improvements through harmonization of the sensors (OLCI), correction of internal stray-light sources (SLSTR), or high-frequency processing of SRAL SARM data. This paper provided a comprehensive overview of the main results obtained, as well as insights into some of the results. Finally, we drew the main lessons learned from the Sentinel-3 tandem phase and provided recommendations for future missions.

The Sentinel-3A and Sentinel-3B satellites were launched, respectively, on 16 February 2016 and 25 April 2018 as part of the European Copernicus program. The Sentinel-3 Surface Topography Mission makes use of the altimeter instruments onboard Sentinel-3A and Sentinel-3B to provide elevation measurements not only of the ocean water level but also of the inland waters and ice caps. For the first time, the altimeters onboard Sentinel-3A and Sentinel-3B are operated in Synthetic Aperture Radar mode over all Earth surfaces. They also benefit from elevation priors (the Open-Loop Tracking Command) allowing them to precisely position their receiving window to track the backscattered signal from the inland water targets to be monitored rather than relying on the traditional Closed-Loop tracking mode. This paper makes use of the Sentinel-3A/Sentinel-3B tandem phase to assess the benefits of the Open-Loop tracking mode compared to Closed-Loop. Longer time series are also used to highlight the improvements in terms of the percentage of points over which the altimeter hooks on water surfaces and water surface height estimation brought by the switch of Sentinel-3A from the Closed-Loop to Open-Loop tracking mode as well as the successive Open-Loop Tracking Command updates. In particular, it is shown that from a Level-3 water level product service perspective, the increase in the number of water bodies with valid water surface height estimates is of the order of 25% in Open-Loop with respect to Closed-Loop with similar precision. It is also emphasized that the Open-Loop Tracking Command update onboard Sentinel-3A from v. 4.2 to v. 5.0 yielded a 30% increase in the number of water bodies over which valid water surface height could be estimated. Eventually, the importance of knowing whether a water target was associated with a fine-tuned Open-Loop Tracking Command or an interpolated one is stressed and the recommendation to provide such a flag in the Sentinel-3 Level2 Payload Data Ground Segment products is emitted.