As of January 2022, ESA has started releasing new CryoSat-2 Thematic Products, dedicated to five distinct areas: Sea Ice, Land Ice, Polar Oceans, Coastal Oceans and Inland Waters.

Developed within the frame of the CryoSat-2 Thematic Products (Cryo-TEMPO) activity, these products benefit from agile and state-of-the-art altimetry processing workflows, which utilise dedicated processing for each domain and optimise data fidelity across each thematic surface.

The simplified format and inclusion of fully traceable uncertainties are designed to make CryoSat-2 datasets accessible to new communities of scientific and service users, who traditionally may have lacked the technical expertise required to utilise previous products. To ensure this, a group of thematic non-altimetry experts has been integral in testing and providing feedback on the prototype datasets during the product design stage.

The products were developed by the Cryo-TEMPO consortium led by the UK Centre for Polar Observation & Modelling (CPOM), and the Lancaster University-UKCEH Centre of Excellence in Environmental Data Science(CEEDS ).

The current product release represents the culmination of Phase 1 of the Cryo-TEMPO activities, which began in October 2020. The consortium is now working on algorithm evolutions for the next product release, which is scheduled for the beginning of 2023.

The new Cryo-TEMPO product files are distributed via ESA's CryoSat-2 Science Server and cover the full duration of the CryoSat-2 mission, from 2010 to the present day.

To find out more, access the CryoTEMPO Product Handbook and the project website.