On July 31, 2025, NASA’s Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) will release the reprocessed Level 1A (L1A), Level 1B (L1B), and Level 2 (L2) altimetry data from the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich/Jason CS radar altimeter mission. This mission aims to provide high-precision measurements of global sea-level that build upon the extensive record of observations from the previous Jason series altimetry missions. Datasets in this release were processed with the latest Sentinel-6 processing baseline (F08), which has been in use operationally for Non-Time Critical (NTC) datasets generated since February 2023.
In the aim of improving the mission long term stability, this F08 baseline provides new data derived from a Numerical Retracker. It presents some processing changes with the update of the altimeter antenna aperture used for the retracking algorithms (from 1.33° to 1.34°) and the update of the coefficient used to compute the ionosphere Total Electron Content (from 0.925 to 0.881, Dettmering and Schwatke [2022]). This reprocessing also brings corrections for missing files and anomalies affecting a small number of passes in the F06/F07 NTC products. Find more information regarding Sentinel-6 data quality and reprocessing.
The reprocessed data included in this release cover the time frame from the start of the mission through present. These new datasets are considered Version F08. The corresponding “Version 2” datasets are retired as of July 31. Users are reminded that they should switch to the datasets listed below to obtain NTC data from PO.DAAC going forward. NRT and STC data will continue to be available through the original datasets released for Version F.
The reprocessed datasets can be accessed through NASA Earthdata Search. They are also accessible via the DOI links listed below.
DOIs
- L1A P4 Altimeter High Resolution (HR) NTC Intermediate Outputs with Instrument Calibrations F08 (doi:10.5067/S6AP4-1AHNTR-F08)
- L1B P4 Altimeter Low Resolution (LR) NTC Geolocated Waveforms F08 (doi:10.5067/S6AP4-1BLNTR-F08)
- L1B P4 Altimeter High Resolution (HR) NTC Geolocated Waveforms F08 (doi:10.5067/S6AP4-1BHNTR-F08)
- L2 P4 Altimeter Low Resolution (LR) NTC Ocean Surface Topography (Unvalidated) F08 (doi:10.5067/S6AP4-2LSNUR-F08)
- L2 P4 Altimeter Low Resolution (LR) NTC Ocean Surface Topography F08 (doi:10.5067/S6AP4-2LSNTR-F08)
- L2 P4 Altimeter Low Resolution (LR) NTC Reduced Ocean Surface Topography (Unvalidated) F08 (doi:10.5067/S6AP4-2LRNUR-F08)
- L2 P4 Altimeter Low Resolution (LR) NTC Reduced Ocean Surface Topography F08 (doi:10.5067/S6AP4-2LRNTR-F08)
- L2 P4 Altimeter High Resolution (HR) NTC Ocean Surface Topography (Unvalidated) F08 (doi:10.5067/S6AP4-2HSNUR-F08)
- L2 P4 Altimeter High Resolution (HR) NTC Ocean Surface Topography F08 (doi:10.5067/S6AP4-2HSNTR-F08)
- L2 P4 Altimeter High Resolution (HR) NTC Reduced Ocean Surface Topography (Unvalidated) F08 (doi:10.5067/S6AP4-2HRNUR-F08)
- L2 P4 Altimeter High Resolution (HR) NTC Reduced Ocean Surface Topography F08 (doi:10.5067/S6AP4-2HRNTR-F08)
- L2 Advanced Microwave Radiometer (AMR-C) NTC Geophysical Parameters F08 (doi:10.5067/S6AMW-2NTCVR-F08)
- L2 Advanced Microwave Radiometer (AMR-C) NTC Geophysical Parameters (Unvalidated) F08 (doi:10.5067/S6AMW-2NTCUR-F08)
Reprocessed Sentinel-6 datasets are also available from EUMETSAT. Minor differences between datasets distributed by EUMETSAT and PO.DAAC are described on the Sentinel-6 mission page on the PO.DAAC Web Portal.
Citations
Please cite the datasets according to this template when used in future publications:
Ocean Surface Topography Science Team. 2023. . PO.DAAC, CA, USA. Dataset accessed [YYYY-MM-DD] at https://doi.org/10.5067/
Cloud Access
Use the following resources for accessing Sentinel-6 MF data from PO.DAAC through the Earthdata Cloud archive in Amazon Web Services (AWS):
- Scripted Access to PO.DAAC Data in the Cloud
- Video Tutorial - this video tutorial and accompanying data subscriber script provide a user guide on scripted access to PO.DAAC data in the Earthdata Cloud. Users are free to use it as a building block, and modify it for use with Sentinel-6 MF data.
- Data subscriber - example script on how to download data given a PO.DAAC collection short name.
- Additional data tutorials and examples can be found on the PO.DAAC Github.
- PO.DAAC Cloud Cookbook - detailed information about how to access data from NASA Earthdata Cloud.
If you have questions, please contact PO.DAAC user services or visit PO.DAAC on Earthdata Forum.