Microwave water-vapor correction for sea height (Sentinel-6A)
What it measures. Atmospheric details like water vapor, wind speed, and how warm the surface looks in microwaves, used to fine-tune sea-height measurements.
How it's made. Produced from the Advanced Microwave Radiometer on the Sentinel-6A satellite and lined up with the radar altimeter's readings, delivered within about 3 hours.
How & where you'd use it. A correction product: it supplies the moisture and atmosphere adjustments that make the satellite's sea surface height measurements accurate, rather than being used on its own.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2020-11-28 → ongoing
- Measured bySentinel-6A (AMR)
- Processing levelLevel 2
- Spatial extent-180, -66.15, 180, 66.15
- FormatsnetCDF-4
- StatusACTIVE
What you can do with it
- Watch sea-surface temperature and marine heatwaves
- Spot algal blooms and ocean-colour shifts
- Support fisheries and coastal monitoring
Official description
Provides L2 near real time (NRT; 3-hour latency) geophysical information from the Advanced Microwave Radiometer on the Sentinel-6A Michael Freilich spacecraft including surface type, wind speed, water vapor, brightness temperature, sigma0, wet troposphere, and associated quality flags. The data are interpolated to intervals that correspond to altimetry measurements from the Poseidon-4 SAR to supply the geophysical and environmental corrections for altimetry. The S6A NRT product is analogous to the Jason-3 OGDR product.
Get the data
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc") # free Earthdata Login
results = earthaccess.search_data(
short_name="JASON_CS_S6A_L2_AMR_RAD_NRT",
version="F",
bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9), # your area (W,S,E,N)
temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"), # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results) # stream straight from POCLOUD Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package. Official links
- Data Use and Citation Guidelines VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- The mission page for Sentinel-6A MF on the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) website. VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- The mission page for Sentinel-6A MF on the NASA Ocean Surface Topography (OST) website. VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- The mission page for Sentinel-6A MF on the European Space Agency (ESA) website. VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- The mission page for Sentinel-6A MF on the PO.DAAC website. VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- The mission page for Sentinel-6A MF on the EUMETSAT website. VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- Jupyter notebooks to access and manipulate data from Sentinel-6A MF. VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- Documentation hosted by EUMETSAT including the Generic File Naming Convention, and the Level 1 and Level 2 Product Format Specifications. VIEW RELATED INFORMATION