Near-Real-Time Monitoring of Global Rivers and Lake Heights using EnviSat and Jason-1

The ESA River and Lake Pilot project has now been running for some time, generating river and lake heights for targets globally. This paper presents a synopsis of the current system for generating river and lake heights from EnviSat Near Real Time (NRT) data and outlines a series of proposed enhancements, including extension of the NRT capability to ingest Jason-1 data. Results from a global analysis of system outputs is given, together with validation results against gauge data. The results demonstrate that very good time series are being recovered from the EnviSat NRT system, and that the current severe filtering of waveform shapes might be relaxed to some extent without significant loss of quality in the output, permitting many more river and lake measurements to be generated