Validation of an Empirical Subwaveform Retracking Strategy for SAR Altimetry

The sea level retrievals from the latest generation of radar altimeters (the SAR altimeters) are still challenging in the coastal zone and areas covered by sea ice and require a dedicated fitting (retracking) strategy for the waveforms. In the framework of the European Space Agency’s Baltic + Sea Le...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Remote Sensing
Main Authors: Marcello Passaro, Laura Rautiainen, Denise Dettmering, Marco Restano, Michael G. Hart-Davis, Florian Schlembach, Jani Särkkä, Felix L. Müller, Christian Schwatke, Jérôme Benveniste
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2022
Subjects:
sea level
retracking
satellite altimetry
tide gauge
Baltic Sea
Science
Q
Jagged
Sea ice
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14164122
https://doaj.org/article/79be1896551849b7bc4491cee854933e
Description
Summary:The sea level retrievals from the latest generation of radar altimeters (the SAR altimeters) are still challenging in the coastal zone and areas covered by sea ice and require a dedicated fitting (retracking) strategy for the waveforms. In the framework of the European Space Agency’s Baltic + Sea Level (ESA Baltic SEAL) project, an empirical retracking strategy (ALES + SAR), including a dedicated sea state bias correction, has been designed to improve the sea level observations in the Baltic Sea, characterised by a jagged coastline and seasonal sea ice coverage, without compromising the quality of open ocean data. In this work, the performances of ALES + SAR are validated against in-situ data in the Baltic Sea. Moreover, variance, crossover differences and power spectral density of the open ocean data are evaluated on a global scale. The results show that ALES + SAR performances are of comparable quality to the ones obtained using physical-based retrackers, with relevant advantages in coastal and sea ice areas in terms of quality and quantity of the sea level data.

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