The Unique Role of the Jason Geodetic Missions for high Resolution Gravity Field and Mean Sea Surface Modelling

The resolutions of current global altimetric gravity models and mean sea surface are around 12 km wavelength resolving 6 features, for many years it has been difficult to improve the resolution further in a systematic way. For both Jason 1 2, Geodetic Mission (GM) carried out as part Extension-of-Life phase. GM Jason-1 lasted 406 days. Jason-2 was planned provide ground-tracks with spacing 4 after 2 potentially years. Unfortunately, satellite ceased operation October 2019 but still provided fantastic dataset high recovery. We highlight improvement field which derived from GM. When an phase is conducted, instruments will be old. Particularly suffered several safe-holds instrument outages during This leads gaps data-coverage degrades quality field. first time, “rewound” mitigate effect outages, we evaluate “mission rewind” on gravity. With recent successful launch Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich (S6-MF, formerly CS), investigate possibility creating track this would lead fundamental increase spatial fields. bisecting existing create mesh twice rather than starting all over new idea explores unique opportunity inject Jason-3 into same orbital plane used tracks. way, already 2-years could grid only GM, Jason-3.