This dataset contains 17-year-long (June 2002 to May 2018 ), high-resolution (20 Hz), along-track sea level dataset in coastal zones of six regions: Mediterranean Sea, Northeast Atlantic, West Africa, North Indian Ocean, Southeast Asia and Australia. Up to now, satellite altimetry has provided global gridded sea level time series up to 10-15 km from the coast only, preventing the estimation of how sea level changes very close to the coast on interannual to decadal time scales.

This dataset has been derived from the ESA SL_cci+ v1.1 dataset of coastal sea level anomalies (also available in the catalogue, DOI:10.5270/esa-sl_cci-xtrack_ales_sla-200206_201805-v1.1-202005), which is based on the reprocessing of raw radar altimetry waveforms from the Jason-1, Jason-2 and Jason-3 satellite missions to derive satellite-sea surface ranges as close as possible to the coast (a process called ‘retracking’) and optimization of the geophysical corrections applied to the range measurements to produce sea level time series. This large amount of coastal sea level estimates has been further analysed to produce the present dataset: it consists in a selection of 429 portions of satellite tracks crossing land for which valid sea level time series are provided at monthly interval together with the associated sea level trends over the 17-year time span at each along-track 20-Hz point, from 20 km offshore to the coast.

The main objective of this dataset is to analyze the sea level trends close to the coast and compare them with the sea level trends observed in the open ocean and to determine the causes of the potential differences.

The product has been developed within the sea level project of the extension phase of the European Space Agency (ESA) Climate Change Initiative (SL_cci+). See 'The Climate Change Coastal Sea Level Team (2020). Sea level anomalies and associated trends estimated from altimetry from 2002 to 2018 at selected coastal sites. Scientific Data (Nature), in press'.

This dataset has a DOI: https://doi.org/10.17882/74354