In all the selected cases, it is necessary to use mean profiles
along the nominal tracks, as no interleaved track
directly flies over the Senetosa calibration site. As mentioned
in Section 3.2, the mean profiles of two missions
are available along the nominal tracks: Jason-1 (2002–
2008) and Jason-2 (2008–2011). On the one hand, the
Jason-2 mean profiles are computed over almost the same
period as the Jason-1 biases on the interleaved orbit. On
the other hand, the Jason-1 mean profiles along the nominal
tracks are certainly more consistent, due to the 7 years
of data, but they are not computed on the same period as
the biases. It was shown in Section 3.2 that the differences
between the two missions principally concern their behaviors
near the coasts and an 11 cm steady bias which does
not interfere in the bias estimation. In order to evaluate
the impact of the choice of the mission for the mean profiles,
both cases were considered in this study.