New Ocean data and more boost CryoSat data platform

#Seas & Oceans, #Data & Tools, #ESA

Published on 17 April 2024

Eight new datasets have been added to the CS2EO platform to support, enhance, and simplify research using CryoSat data. They include the CryoSat Ocean Product, and the Cryo-TEMPO Land Ice, Sea Ice, Polar Ocean, Coastal Ocean and Inland Water datasets.

The Known Locations feature, which allows the retrieval of data within community standard geospatial polygons, has also been upgraded.

CS2EO makes it much simpler and easier to work with altimetry data from ESA, NASA and other sources. It is the best place to access, compare and download datasets from CryoSat, ICESat-2, CRYO2ICE, CryoVEx, Cryo-TEMPO, Cryo-TEMPO-EOLIS and Operation IceBridge.

Tristan Goss, Earthwave’s Head of Engineering, says, “With the latest upgrades, cs2eo.org is evolving into a flexible, user-friendly data portal with a wide range of CryoSat-oriented applications.

“With the addition of the Cryo-TEMPO and Ocean datasets and the full RGIv7 Glaciers product within our Known Locations feature, we’re moving away from a regional, glaciological focus to enabling the full scope of the CryoSat mission and its partnerships and collaborations around the world.

“We’re working hard to further improve our user experience. We’d love to hear from users about any issues they’re experiencing, or new features and functionalities they’d like to propose.”

What are the new features on CS2EO?

For the portal’s March 2024 release, Earthwave - which develops the platform with funding from ESA’s CryoSat mission - added eight new datasets and significantly upgraded the Known Locations feature on the platform, alongside various fixes enabling the use of the new Ocean datasets. Key updates are summarised below.

Cryo-TEMPO

The five Cryo-TEMPO datasets (Land Ice, Sea Ice, Inland Water, Coastal Ocean and Polar Ocean) have been added at Baseline B.

These datasets are now available for intersection processing and download.

Further updates, including the addition of the new Cryo-TEMPO Baseline C, which features a new Summer Sea Ice product, will be coming soon.

cryotempo-products-including-coastal-ocean
New CryoTEMPO products, including Coastal Ocean. Copyright: cs2eo.org, Earthwave

CryoSat L2 Ocean products

The CryoSat Level 2 Near-real time (NOP), Intermediate (IOP) and Global (GOP) Ocean Products have been added.

These datasets are now available for intersection processing and download.

gop-product
New CryoSat-2 Level 2 Ocean products. A GOP product is shown over a distinctly non-polar region in this image. Copyright: cs2eo.org, Earthwave

Known Locations upgraded

In January 2023, a subset of the Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI) v6 polygons within the Iceland, Svalbard and Antarctic regions were made available for use in querying CS2EO, together with the IMBIE drainage basins.

These RGI v6 polygons have now been replaced with RGI v7 polygons (specifically the Glaciers product) from all 20 RGI v7 regions.

In addition, the RGI v7 first order and second order regions have been added, and can be displayed separately or together with the glaciers.

These polygons are streamed in from Earthwave’s Specklia service as the user navigates around the globe in order to manage the data load.

known-locations-upgraded
The known locations feature has been upgraded. Copyright: cs2eo.org, Earthwave

Prototype time series service upgraded

The prototype time series service has been upgraded, and now features a Known Locations mode that works similarly to the Known Locations mode on the main search page.

The polygon used to indicate data coverage on the time series service has been replaced with a purely data-driven coverage indicator.

Time series can now be obtained for a wider portion of Iceland and Svalbard as an indirect result of the recent increase in coverage of the CryoTEMPO-EOLIS Svalbard and Iceland products. This allows for easy comparison and integration with other output using the same geospatial polygons.

Source:

European Space Agency. (2024, April 16). New Ocean data and more boost CryoSat data platform. Earth Online.