ESA Sea State Climate Change Initiative (Sea_State_cci): Global remote sensing multi-mission along-track significant wave height, L2P product, version 1.1

The ESA Sea State Climate Change Initiative (CCI) project has produced global multi-sensor time-series of along-track satellite altimeter significant wave height data (referred to as Level 2P (L2P) data) with a particular focus for use in climate studies. This dataset contains the Version 1.1 Remote Sensing Significant Wave Height product, along-track at approximately 6 km spatial resolution, separated per satellite and pass, including all measurements with flags, corrections and extra parameters from other sources. These are expert products with rich content and no data loss. This first version of the Sea State CCI products is inherited from the GlobWave project building on experience and existing outputs. It extends and improves the GlobWave products which were a post-processing over existing L2 altimeter agency products with additional filtering, corrections and variables. A major improvement consists in a new denoised sea surface height variable using Empirical Mode Decomposition. The altimeter data used in the Sea State CCI dataset v1.1 come from multiple satellite missions spanning from 1991 to 2018 (ERS-1, ERS-2, Topex, Envisat, GFO, CryoSat-2, Jason-1, Jason-2, Jason-3, SARAL). Many altimeters are bi-frequency (Ku-C or Ku-S) and only measurements in the Ku band were used, for consistency reasons, being available on each altimeter but SARAL (Ka band).