Managed by PML.
Collaborating with AMT.
Funded by the EU and ESA
Funded by the European Commission European Space Agency logo Copernicus Logo
This project has now evolved in to the AMT4OceanSatFlux project, for further details see the new website here

Fiducial Reference Measurements

The Sentinel-3 Validation Team (S3VT) has established the concept of Fiducial Reference Measurements (FRM) as:

“The suite of independent ground measurements that provide the maximum Return On Investment (ROI) for a satellite mission by delivering, to users, the required confidence in data products, in the form of independent validation results and satellite measurement uncertainty estimation, over the entire end-to-end duration of a satellite mission.”

The defining mandatory characteristics for FRM are:
  • FRM measurements have documented SI traceability (eg. via round-robin characterisation and regular (pre-and post deployment) calibration of instruments) using metrology standards (eg. [RD-4], [RD-8]).
  • FRM measurements are independent from the satellite geophysical retrieval process.
  • An uncertainty budget for all FRM instruments and derived measurements is available and maintained (eg. [RD-5]).
  • FRM measurement protocols, procedures and community-wide management practices (measurement, processing, archive, documents etc.) are defined, published openly and adhered to by FRM instrument deployments.
  • FRM are accessible to other researchers allowing independent verification of processing systems.
FRM are required to determine the on-orbit uncertainty characteristics of satellite geophysical measurements via independent validation activities.
 

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