Over the last 25 years, ocean radar altimeter satellites have revolutionized our understanding of the world’s oceans. Today six altimeter satellites from different national and international space agencies synoptically measure the ocean surface topography in order to determine how the ocean surface changes with time.

The heart of the altimeter measurement is the precise determination of the orbit reference which is used as the basis from which the changes in the ocean surface are determined. We now routinely determine the orbits of the joint NASA/CNES/NOAA/EUMETSAT missions Jason-2 and Jason-3 with a radial RMS precision of 1 cm.

During this webinar we will describe how we can compute these orbits with such accuracy, and will further outline how these computations rely directly and indirectly on a suite of international Space Geodesy data as well as data from different NASA satellites.