Mean Sea Surface MSS CNES CLS 2025

The mean sea surface (MSS) is an important field in physical oceanography, geophysics, and geodesy. In principle, it corresponds to the time-averaged height of the ocean surface. Auxiliary product : mean sea profile above a reference ellipsoid (T/P or WSG84). This surface is available on a regular grid (1/60°x1/60°, 1 minute).

The mean sea surface MSS_CNES_CLS2025 (Charayon et al., in prep) has been computed using a 29-year [1993-2021] period of altimetric data. It was built exploring the use of SWOT KaRIn data to propose a new generation MSS able to better represent small wavelengths gapping state-of-the-art nadir-based MSS.

Long wavelengths come from a MSS draft chosen to be the Hybrid 23 MSS (https://doi.org/10.24400/527896/a01-2024.002 ) low pass filtered at 20km since this nadir-based MSS model already captured well long wavelengths. The wavelengths shorter than 100km are improved thanks to a SWOT-KaRIn mean profile anomaly to the MSS draft. This mean profile anomaly is built with:

• The SWOT-KaRIn science (L3 v3.0 Expert, cycles 1 to 31 included except cycle 17, https://doi.org/10.24400/527896/a01-2023.018) dataset
• The experimental multimission gridded L4 sea level heights and velocities with SWOT using MIOST (https://doi.org/10.24400/527896/a01-2025.001 ).
• In SWOT diamonds, since KaRIn data are not available, we used another innovation only based on DT2024 1Hz CryoSat2 and AltiKa SSHA data (https://doi.org/10.48670/moi-00146), period from 2010 to 2025, SSHA data relative to MSS Hybrid 23 low pass filtered at 5km. To build this nadir-based innovation, we used the static part of the mapping from MIOST method.