Facing the challenges of using high-resolution sea surface height observations from SWOT

The animation shows one of the first full cycles of SSH anomalies acquired by SWOT (swot.jpl.nasa....) in August 2023. The height of the sea surface has highs (red) and lows (blue) affected by ocean tides, waves, eddies and currents. It takes 21 days for the SWOT satellite to sample almost all of the ocean surface while a conventional altimeter such as Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich (www.jpl.nasa.g...) will do that in only 10 days (albeit at a lower spatial resolution).