ESA Sea State Climate Change Initiative (Sea_State_cci): Global remote sensing multi-mission along-track significant wave height from altimetry, L2P product, version 3

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 3 Remote Sensing Significant Wave Height product, which provides along-track data 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. The altimeter data used in the Sea State CCI dataset v3 come from multiple satellite missions spanning from 2002 to 2022021 (Envisat, CryoSat-2, Jason-1, Jason-2, Jason-3, SARAL, Sentinel-3A), therefore spanning over a shorter time range than version 1.1. Unlike version 1.1, this version 3 involved a complete and consistent retracking of all the included altimeters. Many altimeters are bi-frequency (Ku-C or Ku-S) and only measurements in Ku band were used, for consistency reasons, being available on each altimeter but SARAL (Ka band).