Evaluation of the precision of different Delay-Doppler Processor (DDP) algorithms using CryoSat-2 data over open ocean

•This paper compares the performance of different Delay-Doppler (L1B) processing baselines as applied to CryoSat-2 (CS-2) data.•A very good noise performance is obtained with conventional CS-2 SAR ocean re-tracker (25–30 cm SWH).•Integrated ACDC processing improves the noise performance compared to conventional processing (10–15 cm SWH ∼ 1.5 m).•The CS-2 baseline shows better noise estimation in SWH compared to Sentinel-3 processing baseline.•Similar results are achieved for nominal CS-2 and modified with no zeros in multi-looking.