Altimeter Database and Processing System

ADS

Answering the emerging questions about human-driven climate changes and, more specifically, the sea level change, an interdisciplinary interpretation of various data sets is needed. Several groups on the national and international level are recently active in building up services to facilitate the access to geoscientific data to a broader community, especially the access to higher level products. To support this process GFZ Potsdam is developing the Altimeter Database and Processing System (ADS).

The ADS provides high quality altimeter data for a variety of different altimeter missions and, moreover, processing capabilities for radar altimetry data to a wide range of users. ADS is an attempt to offer easy access to the daily growing satellite altimetry database and numerous geophysical correction models and orbits. Due to the effectiveness of the underlying data structure and software system, new missions and models can be added to the system at any time. The system has undergone several tests by external and internal users successfully and has been proven to be very useful. Especially to those users not having convenient access to a satellite altimetry data processing system and database, ADS offers new possibilities for research activities.

ADS can be accessed worldwide via the internet based user-interface "ADS Central" with a standard browser. After a registration process the system offers higher level standard products, calculated routinely from the harmonized and inter-calibrated satellite database. Additionally, ADS allows to generate individual user specific products. The user is able to perform several processing and analyzing steps, e.g. to generate mean sea surface height grids, to extract altimetry data time series around a given location, to analyze parameter variability, or to perform a crossover analysis. Furthermore, the user can specify general parameters like the time interval or regional subsets and may select different correction models (e.g. tidal models). It is further possible to enter several quality parameters to optimize the data for individual applications. These individual user defined products are automatically processed by ADS at GFZ Potsdam and are subsequently distributed to the user.

To service Altimeter Database and Processing System