Basic Radar Altimetry Toolbox & Tutorial

The Basic Radar Altimetry Toolbox is a collection of tools, tutorials and documents designed to facilitate the use of radar altimetry data. It is able to read most distributed radar altimetry data, from ERS-1 & 2, Topex/Poseidon, Geosat Follow-on, Jason-1 and 2, Envisat, and the future Cryosat mission, to perform some processing, data editing and statistic, and to visualise the results. As part of the Toolbox, a Radar Altimetry Tutorial gives general information about altimetry, the technique involved and its applications, as well as an overview of pas present and future missions, including information on how to access data and additional software and documentation. It also presents a series of data use cases, covering all uses of altimetry over ocean, cryosphere and land, showing the basic methods for some of the most frequent manners of using altimetry data. BRAT has been developed under contract with ESA and CNES (http://www.altimetry.info and http://earth.esa.int/brat/). The Basic Radar Altimetry Toolbox has been available since about a year and a half, and demonstrated since about six months earlier, including during training courses and scientific meetings. Quite a large number of people downloaded it. Users’ feedbacks, developments in altimetry, and practice, show that some new interesting features could be added.