The US-European satellite mission Jason-3, which lifted off California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base on January 17, is going to become the most recent spacecraft for tracking the rate of global sea-level increase.

NOAA’s National Weather Service will also get some help from Jason-3 in forecasting the strength of tropical cyclones threatening America’s coasts, more accurately.

Jason-3 will go through a half-year phase for testing the satellite’s instruments in orbit. After the completion, it will officially start operations, joining Jason-2, launched in 2008.

While flying in a low orbit, 830 miles over our planet, Jason-3 will use a radar altimeter instrument for monitoring 95% of the ice-free oceans in the world every 10 days. Since 1992, when the Topex/Poseidon and Jason satellite missions began, researchers have noted down global sea-level increase taking place at a rate of three mm per year, leading to a total change of 70 mm in 23 years.

The assistant administrator for NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service, Dr Stephen Volz, who is the head of the international mission, said, “Jason-3 will tell us about the heat of the ocean, vital data if a tropical storm or hurricane is tracking into that location. Having up-to-date sea surface temperatures will help NOAA forecasters better determine if a storm may intensify”.

NOAA has come in collaboration with NASA, the Centre national d’études spatiales (CNES, the French Space Agency) and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), for the international mission Jason-3.

Jason-3 data will be used for many scientific, commercial and operational applications, like predicting surface wave for offshore operators; for predicting currents and tides for ship routing and commercial shipping; deep-ocean and wave modeling; for coastal estimations for responding to environmental challenges, such as dangerous algal blooms and oil spills; coastal modeling, which is very important for studying marine mammal and coral reef and El Niño and La Niña forecasting.