Analysis of the Consistency Between Sentinel-3A & B Altimeters During the Tandem Mission

The consistency between the Sentinel-3A & B during the tandem mission is analyzed. The data of a pass with continuous valid measurements of more than 2200 seconds are processed. It is shown that the sea surface height, significant wave height and Sigma-0 measurements of S3A and S3B are all consistent and almost all the error terms can be canceled out. Additionally, the measurements of SAR mode outperform that of the PLRM in the sense of both the relative bias and the relative deviation between S3A and S3B, especially for the 20Hz data, indicating the capability of capturing subtle oceanography features of the SAR altimetry.