| The presentation aims to provide an overview of the Sea Level project of the ESA Climate Change Initiative (CCI) that has started in july 2010. The main objective of this project is to produce and validate Sea Level Essential Climate Variable (ECV) product. It represents the first phase of the ESA CCI where specific objectives are threefold. First, to involve the Climate Research community which is the main user of the Sea Level ECV to improve the understanding of their needs and thus ensure a perfect consistency between the need and the future development and improvement of the altimeter processing system. Secondly, to develop, test and select the best algorithms in order to produce high quality sea level products for climate applications which should be assessed. A particular effort will be done to collect information on the quality and error characteristics of the Sea Level ECV product through the involvement of independent climate research groups. The third objective is to provide a complete specification of the operational production system that should be developed during the phase 2 of the ESA CCI programme. |