MicroWave Expertise center : a work environment for microwave data exploration

The MicroWave Expertise center has first been developed to provide a work environment to support the calibration/validations activities and address the high resolution of Surface Water Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission, launched on December 16th, 2022. Onboard, the new instrument ‘KaRIn’, is a revolution for both oceanography and hydrology communities and gives access to small scale measurements over ocean, worldwide river heights and flows, and lake heights. With optimized storage and computation methods, the MicroWave Expertise Center is designed to ease the exploration and studies of 16TB/day products. The tools developed for SWOT are generic and can now be applied to any altimetric mission. Experts are provided simple and scriptable explore numerous data providers such as copernicus dias, ecmwf, hydroweb.next. Some tutorials are already available along with visualisation tools. And the list will be growing up in close future from users requirements. The expertise center is operational and ensure SWOT calval activities. Prospects address SWOT ocean and hydrology studies but could be enlarged to hydrological research, multi-sensor comparison