Conquering the coastal zone: a new frontier for satellite altimetry, 20 years of Progress in Radar Altimetry symposium

PAOLO CIPOLLINI; MARTIN SARACENO

Simposio; 20 years of Progress in Radar Altimetry symposium; 2012

Coastal altimetry, that is the effort to recover meaningful measurements of sea level and significant wave height in the coastal strip from satellite-borne radar instruments, is successfully extending altimetry to a previously uncharted domain. This success is apparent at the annual Coastal Altimetry Workshops, whose 6th edition (Riva del Garda 20?21 September, 2012) was held just before the ?20 Year of Progress in Radar Altimetry? Symposium. The efforts of such a vibrant international community are bringing coastal altimetry to maturity, as a science topic of great relevance to monitor the coastal environment and assess the impact of global change on the coasts. Datasets are being produced, results are coming out and being disseminated, applications are pioneered. The Springer book Coastal Altimetry, published in 2011, is a good account of such efforts. The cross-fertilization of ideas with OSTST (of which the coastal altimetry community constitutes a special splinter) brings significant mutual benefits, both in terms of technical insight and in terms of synergy of open-ocean and coastal applications. The present contribution is meant as a ?community white paper? and aims at giving an account of the development and accomplishments of the new field. We summarize the main technical achievements and the many diverse applications of the new discipline, as well as the recommendations that stemmed from recent discussion. While coastal altimetry techniques are recovering extremely valuable information from the 20+ years of data already in the archives, even more exciting prospects are ahead of us with the processing of higher resolution altimetric missions (CryoSat, Sentinel-3, Jason-CS, SWOT).