News

On the afternoon of the 5th January 2008, a team of adventurous surfers was able to ride huge waves at Cortes Bank spot, bringing back these impressive reports and pictures of some of the biggest waves ever surfed on this spot. But swells can be observed and followed also from space using the synthetic aperture radars such as the ASAR instrument onboard ENVISAT on a routine basis. We provide every day animations of the latest observed swell systems over the world and this exceptionnal event reveals how "local" observation and spaceborn remote-sensing can impressively match together.

The month of September of this International Polar Year is marked by a record : Arctic sea ice has hit its lowest value since the beginning of satellite observations exist (almost 30 years).

We are pleased to offer the following announcement from ESA : the European Space Agency is organising its second SAR oceanography workshop, SEASAR 2008, entitled "Advances in SAR Oceanography from ENVISAT and ERS missions", which will be hosted at ESA ESRIN in Frascati, Italy, from 21 to 25 January 2008. This workshop will focus on all ocean applications of SAR, including remote-sensing of wind, waves, currents and oil-spill, operational applications and services, etc...

Radiometers onboard satellites are commonly used to estimate sea ice concentration and extent. For several years, CERSAT has been providing daily Arctic sea ice maps at 12.5 km resolution.

Four years after a first meeting to assess the state of knowledge on waves in relation to currents, surface drifts and air-sea interactions, SHOM and Ifremer will reconvene a workshop on this topic in Brest, on 19th September 2007. Our purpose is to track recent progress in the understanding of wave-current interaction processes in relation with the operational forecasting systems. Please read the full annoucement for this workshop.

Registrations are now closed, thank you to the numerous participants and see you in Brest!

IFREMER and the European Space Agency (ESA) are sponsoring an ocean wave data user workshop, to be held at Ifremer (Brest, France), and scheduled on Thursday 20 and Friday 21 September 2007. The main objective of this workshop is to address the issues related to wave data (availability, access, validation, synergies, potential value-added products, etc...) and to prepare guidelines for a possible future Data User Element project "GLOBWAVE" competitively funded by ESA to demonstrate the feasibility of a unified wave data service with detailed objectives to be defined.

Registrations are now closed, thank you to the numerous participants and see you in Brest! A questionnaire is also available for you to express your needs and concerns regarding usage of wave data. Read the complete annoucement in the full news.

For several years, the CERSAT has been providing sea ice data and maps from various scatterometers (microwave radar) and radiometers onboard earth observation satellites (ERS-1, ERS-2, ADEOS-1, QuikSCAT, SSM/I, AMSR-E).

The scatterometer is initially designed to measure winds over ocean surface, but it can also be used to detect sea ice edge and sea ice type (first year, multi-year). Radiometer is commonly used for sea ice concentration. Using correlation technique between successive maps, sea ice drifts can be estimated from both of these sensors.

This new product available at CERSAT consists of weekly and monthly gridded fields of CO2 exchange coefficients derived from scatterometer ocean surface winds and sea surface temperature, using several relationships relating these parameters together. Fields have been produced separately from each available scatterometer (ERS-1, ERS-2 and QuikSCAT) providing a cumulated time series of more than 15 years. The data are available on ftp and are regularly updated. This work is a joint collaboration between the CERSAT and the LOCEAN.

NAUSICAA is a new interactive browser available on CERSAT web site allowing the visualization of satellite and in situ data over predefined regional areas, currently the Bay of Biscay, the Channel and North Sea, as well as the Gulf of Lion in the mediterrenean sea. This browser can be used with any recent navigator, users just need to register to get full access to all available features. The displayed data consist of images or vector data (mark-ups, arrows, contour lines) associated with advanced interactive functions(zoom, data extraction, color palette adjustement, layers,...). NAUSICAA is mostly intended for monitoring and understanding the bio-geophysical processes occuring in regional areas (algae bloom, etc...). It is supported by MarCoast ESA/European project.

Live Access Server (LAS) is a web tool which provides flexible access to geo-referenced scientific data. Data can be visualized, subsetted and extracted into various formats. The CERSAT LAS features most of its gridded products such as wind fields, , fluxes, sea surface temparature. New products will be added soon.

Access to the LAS