ALTICORE - A consortium serving european seas with coastal altimetry

In this paper, we describe the ALTICORE (value added satellite ALTImetry in COastal REgions) initiative, a consortium aiming at providing high quality coastal altimetry over some European seas. Taking the Ligurian Sea in the NW Mediterranean as an example, which acts as a test zone for this work, we show the improvement in availability and quality of ENVISAT data, through our processing, when compared with the official altimetric products delivered by AVISO. We also introduce the building concepts of solutions for data search, extraction, update and delivery based on web-services. This grid-type infrastructure is being designed within ALTICORE.