Media Reel: Sentinel-6B

B-roll for media and public use. NASA and its U.S. and international partners have teamed up to launch a new Earth-observing satellite called Sentinel-6B that will measure sea surface height of most of the planet’s ocean. These observations will help build an accurate picture of local and global sea levels to support weather and storm forecasting, secure coastal property and infrastructure, and help optimize commercial activities such as shipping and undersea pipeline operations. Sentinel-6B will be the latest in a series of satellites dating back to 1992 that have created a more-than-30-year record of sea level rise around the globe. It’s part of the Copernicus Sentinel-6/Jason-Continuity of Service (CS) mission, which in 2020 launched Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich. As its twin, Sentinel-6B will continue measuring sea levels down to roughly an inch for about 90% of Earth’s ocean. The Copernicus Sentinel-6/Jason-CS mission was jointly developed by NASA, ESA (European Space Agency), EUMETSAT (the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), with funding support from the European Commission and technical support from the French space agency CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales). This reel includes b-roll captured during spacecraft assembly, test, and launch operations as well as mission animations and interviews with mission team members. For more information on the Sentinel-6B mission, visit: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/sentinel-6b/

What is said in the film

What we're really trying to find out is how do things change over time? They change slowly over time as a whole system. So we're seeing millimeter level trends over the course of many years. However, the ocean is very dynamic, and knowing what's happening in the regional space is very, very different. And it changes within hours.

So really understanding what's happening within hours is very, very important. So even with the best models that have now been created, they still need data to actually inform and train those models. Understanding what's happening with the full water cycle, whether it's freshwater, coastal, and the oceans is very, very important to be able to literally, affect what's happening with agriculture, the cleanliness of our water, the availability of our water, and also the economics, of of what's happening with the, displacement of water and where it's needed. And there's too much of it in short amounts of times, which caused disasters like floods to very on the opposite scale, where there's too little and we have droughts and, tremendous, impacts with the lack of water. Having a measurement really is important towards understanding what's happening with the ocean, both in real time but also in terms of forecasting, because it really impacts how we live in everyday life along the coast, but also in terms of what happens in the ocean and on the ocean, whether it's with shipping, navigation, and especially with how the ocean is interacting with the atmosphere towards these sorts of extreme events like hurricanes.

I really hope like Sentinel 6B data are going to be, used by people all around the world to improve, our forecast, whether it's for El Nino, La Nin or hurricane intensification or for coastal communities to better plan for the for the future. Sentinel-6B is the latest in a long generation of satellite altimeters. Provides really good information about how sea levels are changing now, but also compare them to how they've changed in the past. So we can see exactly how things are evolving over time as Earth changes in our oceans change. So the way the Sentinel-6B measures is it sends a radar signal down to the surface of the ocean and measures how long it takes that signal to get back to the satellite.

And from that, we can really get a very accurate measurement of how sea levels are changing locally and on a global scale, down to about a one inch accuracy.

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