The ocean plays an essential role in regulating Earth’s climate, influencing weather conditions, providing sustenance for large populations, moderating anthropogenic climate change, encompassing massive biodiversity, and sustaining the global economy. Human activities are changing the oceans, stressing ocean health, threatening the critical services the ocean provides to society, with significant consequences for human well-be...

Five successive reference missions, TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason-1, Jason-2, Jason-3, and more recently Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, have ensured the continuity and stability of the satellite altimetry data record. Tandem flight phases have played a key role in verifying and ensuring the consistency of sea level measurements between successive altimetry reference missions and thus the stability of sea level measurements. During a tan...

Earth’s energy imbalance (EEI) is a fundamental metric of global Earth system change, quantifying the cumulative impact of natural and anthropogenic radiative forcings and feedback. To date, the most precise measurements of EEI change are obtained through radiometric observations at the top of the atmosphere (TOA), while the quantification of EEI absolute magnitude is facilitated through heat inventory analysis, where ~ 90% of...

Satellite observations from the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System show that Earth’s energy imbalance has doubled from 0.5 ± 0.2 Wm −2 during the first 10 years of this century to 1.0 ± 0.2 Wm − 2 during the past decade. The increase is the result of a 0.9 ± 0.3 Wm −2 increase absorbed solar radiation (ASR) that is partially offset by a 0.4 ± 0.25 Wm −2 increase in outgoing longwave radiation (OLR). Despite marked di...

We present the latest release of the global mean sea level (GMSL) record produced by the French space agency Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) and distributed on the AVISO+ website. This dataset is based on reprocessed along-track data, so-called L2P 21, of the reference missions TOPEX/Poseidon (TP) and Jason-1, Jason-2 and Jason-3. The L2P 21 CNES/AVISO+ GMSL record covers the period January 1993 to December 2021 and...