PATASWOT: a Cal/Val experiment in the Argentine Patagonian Continental Shelf during the 1-day repeat orbit of SWOT

MARTIN SARACENO; LAURA A. RUIZ ETCHEVERRY; NICOLAS AUBONE; MELINA M. MARTINEZ

Congreso; 2023 Ocean Surface Topography Science Team Meeting; 2023

CNES

The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite mission launched December 16th 2022. SWOT sea surface height measurements can help retrieve the dynamics of the upper ocean at an unprecedented O(10km) resolution. SWOT surface maps are expected to have a resolution roughly one order of magnitude finer than what is now available with conventional satellite altimetry. This improvement in resolution is expected to be groundbreaking for several key ocean questions, including the energy budget, the connection between surface and internal dynamics, biogeochemistry and biodiversity, and the dynamics at the ice margin.To have a better understanding of the new dataset, the satellite mission was designed to fly on a 1-day-repeat for three months. An international consortium, SWOT Adopt a Crossover – AdAc, www.swot-adac.org, has been created to obtain in-situ measurements during this phase. Within this initiative, and the SABIO EUMETSAT-CNES project, three moorings were deployed in the Argentine Continental Shelf under the SWOT 1-day-repeat track. The three moorings were deployed at the sea bottom and are equipped with Conductivity, Temperature and Depth (CTD) recorders and an upper-looking current meter. Two of them were deployed close to San Matias Gulf, at about 41S and 23 m and 50 m depth. The third mooring was deployed further south, at 52.13S and 100 m depth. Here we compare the preliminary L3 SSH data that include the SWOT nadir data with traditional altimeter gridded data and provide a discussion about the difference observed. Comparison with data gathered by the in-situ instruments will be included if the instruments are recovered as planned, during October 2023