The two Coastal Altimetry sessions at IGARSS on July 9th, chaired by Bill Emery and Paolo Cipollini, were well attended and highlighted the many recent advances in the discipline as well as the work that remains to be done. Stefano Vignudelli kicked off the talks with a summary of the many lessons on how to recover and reprocess altimetry data learnt during the ALTICORE Project (http://www.alticore.eu). Luciana Fenoglio then described the work by TU Darmstadt over the Mediterranean, which includes some specialized retracking of the waveforms. In Joana Fernandes' absence, her slot was used for an informal and informative discussion on the many remaining challenges in Coastal Altimetry, with several comments from the attendees pointing at the wet tropospheric (the topic of her talk) and tidal corrections as the two major issues. Richard Ray then gave a very comprehensive review of the state of the art in coastal tidal modelling, and advocated an international program to develop hi-res local tide models merged into global models. John Wilkin closed the first of the two sessions showing a successful application of coastal altimetry data assimilation along the US East coast. In the second Session, Doug Vandemark gave an overview of his work in the Gulf of Maine, where the high-frequency barotropic signal is the most crucial correction, and Jèrôme Bouffard described work done in the seas around Corsica comparing coastal altimetry with tide gauges and the SYMPHONIE model. Then Paolo Cipollini presented objectives and progress of the ESA-funded COASTALT project (going in parallel to a CNES-funded study, PISTACH) and Juan Jose Martinez-Benjamin told us about work combining altimetry and CGPS observations in the NorthWestern Mediterranean. Graham Quartly concluded the session with a detailed look at individual echoes from Envisat RA-2, which paves the way to coastal retracking. 

The full program of the first part of the session is here

The full program of the second part of the session is here