ESA’s Climate Change Initiative (CCI) program is dedicated to the provision of data for studies on climate change. The objective of CCI+ Sea State is to develop an 18-year data set (2002- 2020) capitalising on the rich satellite altimeter, SAR imager, in situ and other data holdings available during that period. The focus was on the development, testing and improvement of dedicated sea state retrieval algorithms with respect to climate users' requirements.
In the project runtime, DLR extended the established algorithm for SAR sea state retrieval to Sentinel-1 Wave Mode (WV) products, which calculates various sea state parameters, e.g. wave height and period. The entire archive of Sentinel-1 WV data was processed using the Geofarm infrastructure and products were provided to ESA for public access.