Topic: Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich Data Now Publicly Available

Date/Time Issued: November 30, 2021 1800 UTC

Product(s) or Data Impacted:  Sentinel-6 Products

Date/Time of Initial Impact: November 30, 2021 0000 UTC

Date/Time of Expected End: NA

Length of Outage: NA

Details/Specifics of Change:

Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich has successfully completed its commissioning phase and entered routine operations, and all low-latency Level-2 data from the mission is now available per subscription on PDA to approved users. In addition to the Low-Resolution products released in June, Sentinel-6A products now available include High Resolution Near-Real Time (NRT) and Slow-Time Critical (STC) Level 2 products produced from the SAR mode of the altimeter.

During Commissioning, some issues were identified in the products, particularly for wave heights. These issues are summarized in the Product Notice at EUMETSAT https://www.eumetsat.int/media/48237. 

The short names of the High-Resolution products are S6-NRT-HR-L2 and S6-STC-HR-L2, and the files are similar to Jason-3 OGDRs and IGDRs, respectively. These data are packaged as tar bundles in EUMETSAT “SAFE” format. Each NRT tar file will have two NetCDF files, reduced (RED) and standard (STD), a BUFR file, and an XML manifest. The STC bundle will have the same content, except no BUFR file.

Sentinel-6A will continue with calibration/validation activities in tandem with Jason-3 until March 2022. At that point, Jason-3 will move to an orbit with groundtracks interleaved with S6A, effectively doubling the spatial coverage.

User feedback and questions should be directed to David Donahue: david.r.donahue@noaa.gov

Contact Information: For information on the status of this work, please contact David Donahue david.r.donahue@noaa.gov or ESPC Operations at ESPCOperations@noaa.gov 

Web Site(s) for applicable information: https://www.eumetsat.int/sentinel-6-data and (https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/Sentinel-6?sections=data).