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COASTALT Envisat CGDR PRODUCT
(Coastal Geophysical Data Records)
V 2.0r3 October 2011

Produced within the COASTALT Project
ESA/ESRIN Contract No. 21201/08/I-LG 
http://www.coastalt.eu
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This directory contains the Envisat RA-2 CGDR product v2.0r3 generated by the COASTALT project funded by the European Space Agency.
The CGDRs in COASTALT have been computed for a limited number of Envisat pilot tracks over three regions (Western Mediterranean, West of Britain, Western Iberia) in European Seas, for cycles 9 to 68 of Envisat

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DISCLAIMER
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All these data are EXPERIMENTAL and are distributed 'as is' for further R&D purposes only. They should NOT be used in any operational or mission critical setting. In particular, the outputs of the new retrackers (specular and mixed) are provided only to facilitate further analysis and research, since they are not fully consistent with the in situ measurements - use the data at your own risk.

== DATA COVERAGE ============
The passes/areas covered are
Western Mediterranean - 'wme': pass0130  pass0257  pass887
West of Britain - 'wbr: pass0160 pass0704
West Iberia (Portugal) - 'prt': pass0001 pass0160

Subdirectory /maps contains plots of the geographical location of the pilot tracks and kml files with the 18Hz locations for example passes.
Cycles are 9 to 68 (with a few missing, varying from pass to pass)

== DATA FORMAT ==============
The COASTALT Envisat CGDR are in NetCDF format compliant with Climate and Forecast (CF) Metadata Conventions v 1.4. Filenames are the same of the Envisat original SGDR files, with extension '.nc' instead of 'N1'
The full specification is described in the Product Specification Document COASTALT_product_spec_v2r3.pdf, available under /docs

== DATA HANDBOOK ============
A comprehensive Envisat Coastal Altimetry Data Handbook is also available under /docs

== COMMENTS/ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ========
Please direct any feedback, comments and suggestions to the COASTALT Project Manager, Dr. Paolo Cipollini of the National Oceanography Centre, U.K. -email: cipo@noc.ac.uk
If you use these data in any publication, please acknowledge them like this"
"The Envisat Coastal Altimeter data are the Coastal Geophysical Data Records v2.0r3 produced by the COASTALT Project funded by the European Space Agency (ESA/ESRIN Contract No. 21201/08/I-LG)"

== TO PROBE FURTHER ===============
Further information on COASTALT is available on the project web site http://www.coastalt.eu

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README_FIRST.txt v1.0, 12 Oct 2011, Paolo Cipollini, NOC U.K., cipo@noc.ac.uk