To enable their full scientific and operational exploitation, the CryoSat products are routinely monitored for quality. The results of quality control and mission performance monitoring are reported through different means:

Daily Performance Quality Reports

Daily reports are generated for all CryoSat product types, both ice and ocean, to provide a quick overview of the L1 and L2 product quality. For each day of data, these reports provide an overview of relevant mission/ instrument news, known data gaps and global plots of the data coverage. They provide information about any inconsistencies observed in the data products and any flags raised, including quality flags, tracking flags, measurement confidence flags, correction error flags. Users may wish to use these flags to apply filtering to their dataset. You can find the reports in QRAS, by applying the active filters: ‘CryoSat’, ‘SIRAL’, ‘Daily’ and ‘Quality Control Report’.

Monthly Performance Quality Reports
Monthly (or Cyclic) reports are generated for Offline L1B and L2 ice products and include monthly plots and statistics to provide users with a clear snapshot of SIRAL instrument health, data availability and any changes in key quality parameters. Cyclic reports cover a 30-day reporting period, defined since the beginning of the mission purely for statistic reporting purposes. You can find the reports in QRAS, by applying the active filters: ‘CryoSat’, ‘SIRAL’, ‘Cyclic’ and ‘Quality Control Report’.

Quality Monitoring of Ice Products
Long-term CryoSat performance and ice product quality is monitored by the CryoSat L2 Performance Monitoring service. This service routinely monitors L2 and L2i data products generated operationally. Long-term analysis includes the monitoring of key L2 parameters (e.g. backscatter, freeboard and Sea Surface Height Anomaly), retracker failure statistics and L2 quality flags. Crossover analysis is performed in order to assess the performance of the instrument and the processing chain.

Quality Monitoring of Ocean Products
CryoSat Ocean products are routinely quality-controlled and validated by the UK National Oceanography Centre (NOC). The CryoSat Quality Control and Validation Daily and Monthly reports aim to provide an overview of the quality of CryoSat NRT Ocean (NOP) Products, Intermediate Ocean Products (IOP) and Geophysical Ocean Products (GOP). Fast Delivery Marine (FDM) production was discontinued on 01/02/2021.

Quality Monitoring of Cryo-TEMPO Products
TThe CryoSat ThEMatic PrOducts (Cryo-TEMPO) quality control and validation portal provides monthly thematic product reports, maps and statistical trends of each product's parameters over key areas of interest for each Cryo-TEMPO theme (land ice, sea ice, polar oceans, coastal oceans and inland waters) The Cryo-TEMPO products include fully-traceable discrepancies and use the most up to date processing dedicated to each thematic area. Throughout the project, the products will be constantly updated, and validated by a group of Thematic Users, thus ensuring optimal relevance and impact for the intended target communities. The Cryo-TEMPO quality control portal provides users with easy access to view product parameters and statistics from each Cryo-TEMPO product baseline, as soon as they are available.