The NOAA GEOSAT geophysical data records : Summary of the third year of the Exact Repeat Mission

"The GEOSAT radar altimeter provided approximately 80 million global observations of sea level, wind speed, and significant wave height between April 1985 and the end of the mission on January 5, 1990. Although sea level observations made by GEOSAT during the first 18 months of the mission are classified, data collected after November 8, 1986, are publicly available through NOAA. This portion of the GEOSAT mission is known as the Exact Repeat Mission (ERM) because the ground track repeated within approximately 1 km every 17 days. The National Ocean Service of NOAA, in cooperation with the U.S. Navy and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU APL), produced the GEOSAT Geophysical Data Records (GDRs). For background or ordering information, see the "GEOSAT Altimeter Geophysical Data Record User Handbook" (Cheney et al., 1987), which describes the data flow and NOAA processing. In this report we summarize GEOSAT ocean data collected during the third and final year of the ERM, November 1988- 89. (A secondary set of ice/land GDRs was also produced, but will not be discussed in this summary.) For similar reports on the first 2 years of the ERM, see Cheney et al. (1988) and Doyle et al. (1989)."