Dr. Stefano Vignudelli (CNR) has been invited to present ALTICORE initiative at Coastal Altimetry Workshop, jointly organized by National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Cooperative Institute for Oceanographic Satellite Studies (CIOSS) in Silver Spring (Maryland, United States) during 5-7 February 2008.  Other ALTICORE members of the European delegation include Helen Snaith (NOCS), Laurent Roblou and Jerome Bouffard (LEGOS).  

The workshop focuses on the use of altimetric sea surface height and surface current data in coastal regions (within 50-100 km of the coast). Laury Miller and Walter Smith (NOAA Laboratory for Satellite Altimetry) and Ted Strub (Oregon State University/ Cooperative  Institute for Oceanographic Satellite Studies) are in charge of organizing the workshop.

The goal is to bring together a relatively small group of research  scientists interested in attending and contributing to the discussion of techniques needed to use altimeter data close to the coast, and applications that would make use of these data. 

The discussion would be on: 

1) methods of retrieving altimeter data (primarily alongtrack) in coastal regions where the data are presently flagged as unusable for a number of reasons 

2) high resolution coastal/regional atmospheric or oceanographic models that may provide some of the “substitute corrections” needed in the coastal ocean (integrated atmospheric water vapor, atmospheric pressure, ocean barotropic tides, coastal trapped waves and other high frequency signals, etc) or that are intended to assimilate the alongtrack altimeter data 

3) applications that would benefit from the coastal altimeter data (SSH and surface currents) or fields from models that assimilate the altimeter data. 

The workshop will consist of two sessions: the first will be the “nuts and bolts” session with presentations and discussions of techniques used to recover the coastal altimetric SSH and corrections to that SSH; the second will be a discussion of the coastal applications that could make use of the coastal SSH and current data, based on realistic estimates of what that data might look like at present and in the future. 

The workshop will be most successful if it leads to continued collaborations with a focus on improving the use of coastal altimeter data. We are hoping for strong European participation in the workshop, given their significant past and present efforts in coastal altimeter applications, through initiatives such as ALTICORE. 

The agenda of the workshop can be found here 

The workshop website can be found here