The India-France SARAL/AltiKa mission was launched in February 2013. It is the first Ka-band altimetric mission dedicated to oceanography. The mission objectives are primarily the observation of the oceanic mesoscales, and also include coastal oceanography, global and regional sea level monitoring, data assimilation and operational oceanography. But objectives include ice sheet, sea ice and inland waters monitoring. Two years after launch, the results widely confirm the nominal expectations in terms of accuracy, data quality and data availability in general.
Because it flies on the same historical 35-day orbit than previous European ERS and Envisat satellites, the extended time survey over the same satellite tracks offers great opportunity to monitor ice sheets and inland waters over a long period, thus providing special potentialities for such cryosphere and hydrological studies.
This session aims at considering the use of SARAL/AltiKa for all science applications together with new opportunity and to provide a platform of information that illustrates todays SARAL/AltiKa data most original salient features with regard to standard altimetry: data availability, data accuracy at the mesoscales, data usefulness in coastal area, over ice sheet, sea ice or for inland waters.