Sea state covers ocean wave conditions such as significant wave height, wave spectra, wave period, direction, and forecast or climate sea-state indicators. The observed signals include radar altimeter waveforms, SAR wave-mode spectra, model-assimilated wave fields, and optical wave-pattern proxies, with outputs delivered as along-track, scene-scale, and global gridded products for near-real-time marine operations, delayed-mode processing, and climate records.^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4]

SAR wave-mode retrieval supports ocean swell spectra and integrated wave parameters, with availability tied to acquisition mode and open-ocean wave-mode use cases.^[1]^[5] Radar altimetry supports significant wave height and along-track wind-speed information, with sparse track sampling and limited directional-spectrum information as caveats.^[2]^[6] Copernicus Marine wave products cover global wave analysis and forecast fields plus satellite spectral parameters, while ESA Sea State CCI provides climate-record significant wave height products.^[3]^[7]^[4] Optical wave-spectra retrieval can estimate wave-pattern properties from visible imagery under clear-sky and suitable illumination conditions, making it a complementary route rather than an all-weather baseline.^[8]

What's available today

5 data products and 35 sensors. Start with the most-used; switch to Filter for the full catalogue.

5 Data products

0 Services

35 Sensors

5 open

Data products

Open Copernicus Marine Global Ocean L3 spectral wave parameters

Open Copernicus Marine Global Ocean Waves Analysis and Forecast

Open Copernicus Sentinel-3 marine altimetry Level-2

Open ESA Sea State CCI L2P significant wave height

Open Sentinel-1 Level-2 Ocean (OCN)

C-SAR Sentinel-1A

Capella X-band SAR Capella Space SAR constellation

COSI (Corea SAR Instrument) KOMPSAT-5

CSG-SAR COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation

HY-2B Radar Altimeter HY-2B

HY-2C Radar Altimeter HY-2C

HY-2D Radar Altimeter HY-2D

ICEYE X-band SAR ICEYE SAR constellation

Ka-band Radar Interferometer (KaRIn) Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT)

MetaSAR-C —

MetaSAR-L —

MetaSAR-X —

MeteoSAR Meteorological Synthetic Aperture Radar Meteor-M N2-4

MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) Aqua

MONITORED AI —

MSI (MultiSpectral Instrument) Sentinel-2A

NISAR L-band SAR NISAR

NISAR S-band SAR NISAR

PALSAR-2 ALOS-2

PAZ SAR PAZ

Poseidon-3C Altimeter Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT)

Poseidon-4 SAR Altimeter Sentinel-6B

SAR Interferometer Radar Altimeter (SIRAL) CryoSat-2

SAR-2000 COSMO-SkyMed

SAR-C (EOS-04) EOS-04

SAR-C (Gaofen-3) Gaofen-3 (GF-3)

SAR-L (SAOCOM L-band SAR) SAOCOM-1A

SAR-X (RISAT-2 series) RISAT-2BR1

SARah active phased-array SAR SARah

SARah passive reflector SAR SARah

StriX SAR Synspective StriX

Surface Waves Investigation and Monitoring instrument (SWIM) CFOSAT

Synthetic Aperture Radar Altimeter (SRAL) Sentinel-3B

TerraSAR-X SAR TerraSAR-X

UMBRA-SAR Umbra SAR constellation

Sources

[1]Sentinel-1 productsagency doc2026-06-08
[2]Altimetry productsagency doc2026-06-08
[3]Global Ocean Waves Analysis and Forecastagency doc2026-06-08
[4]ESA Sea State CCI dataagency doc2026-06-08
[5]Sentinel-1 data collections documentationagency doc2026-06-08
[6]Sea State CCI Product Specification Document version 2.0agency doc2026-06-08
[7]Global Ocean L3 spectral parameters from NRT satellite measurementsagency doc2026-06-08
[8]Remote sensing of ocean waves by optical imagerypeer reviewed2026-06-08

How to cite this page

Plain text

Sea state. EO-Atlas, SpectraWorks B.V. https://eo-atlas.org/topics/sea-state (CC BY 4.0)

BibTeX

@misc{eoatlas:topics:sea-state,
  title = {Sea state},
  author = {{EO-Atlas}},
  publisher = {SpectraWorks B.V.},
  note = {CC BY 4.0},
  url = {https://eo-atlas.org/topics/sea-state}
}