Well, I just did 5 review over the past month ... and I refused to do at least as much. There are also too many journals publishing too many papers... at least in my field.

I'm very fortunate to work now on SWOT data (the most amazing source of wave measurements together with CFOSAT). I'm also working on the next challenge: measuring ocean currents from space with ODYSEA, because currents also impact waves!

odysea.ucsd.edu

That should be another launch around 2030

For the @esaearth.esa.int project we chose the WHALES retracker because:
1) open source (github.com/ne62rut/whales )
2) gives low noise globally and more data near the coast
3) successfully applied to all missions starting with ERS-1 (ERS-1 with WHALES will be in the CCI v5 dataset next year)

The actual resolution also depends on the processing (retracking): giving more weights to near-nadir echoes, retrackers such as the Adaptive or WHALES retrackers acheive a higher effective resolution ... while at the same time reducing the "noise" in the wav height measurement.

I happen to be the "science lead" for the European Space Agency "Sea State" climate change initiative, coordinating the exploration of ocean wave climate time series from both imaging radars and radar altimeters. climate.esa.int/en/projects/...

We are providing advanced processing and monitoring

Satellite launches may all look routine... but well, bad things can happen, from a rocket failure (think Cryosat) to near-collision of S1-A requiring manoeuvers few hours after launch. Getting these new observations will continue time series of sea level but also of ocean wave heights

S6B is a collaboration between Europe (ESA, Eumetsat) and the USA (NASA), following up the USA-France collaborative missions Topex-Poseidon, Jason ... Indeed, the main instrument on S6B, the radar altimeter, is a Poseidon-4 instrument, made by Thales Alenia Space in France.