The ground tracking network has a dual objective: serving ocean altimetry and geodesy. We look back over the continual enhancement of the infrastructure to better achieve these goals. We highlight the contribution of the network for the POD in terms of reliability and performance, and for the geodesy thanks to long-term life, stability and co-location of the stations.
We make a status report on the current overall performance of the sixty ground stations evenly distributed on the Earth’s surface and see what are the areas where there is still room for improvement.
We detail the main recent network events and development (2019-2022) and show the impact of the global sanitary crisis.
Finally, we give information on the future plans for the coming years despite the prevailing uncertainties regarding on-site operations.