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Abstract

Coastal-to-land sites are mostly affected by climate changes and are at multi-risks due to coastline retreat, flooding storms and river floods. New altimeter processing and new missions open new possibilities to observe fine-scale spatial changes in this region. Region of analysis are the German coasts and the nearby seas and estuaries, with the Danish Straits and the coastal and cyclonic circulation in the Baltic Sea under the SWOT cal/val. We consider the Fully-Focus (FF-SAR) processing near coast. Results depend on the retracking method and land contamination is affecting FF-SAR. The SAMOSA+ retracker gives the best results for both FFSAR and unfocused SAR (USAR). The ability of the model to reproduce the high variability at fine spatial-scale is then investigated using regional ocean models. Ocean simulation sea level is compared to nadir-altimetry along the satellite ground tracks. While the coverage of nadir-altimeter is limited by the number of ground-tracks, SWOT provides a uniform coverage and is not affected by land contamination. In the second part of this study we investigate using simulated data the signal expected from the SWOT mission. Due to the differences between along-track and swath-altimetry, new methods to derive accuracy and precision of the measurements and relevant ocean parameters are considered.