Performance Analysis of Ku/Ka Dual-Band SAR Altimeter from an Airborne Experiment over South China Sea

Satellite radar altimeters have been successfully used for sea surface height (SSH) measurement decades, gaining great insight in oceanography, meteorology, marine geology, etc. To further improve the observation precision and spatial resolution, evolved from real aperture to synthetic aperture, Ku-band Ka-band. Future (SAR) altimeter of Ka-band is expected achieve better performance than its predecessors. verify SAR data processing method explore system advantage Ka-band, a Ku/Ka dual-band airborne experiment was carried out over South China Sea on 6 November 2021. Through dedicated hardware design, this campaign has acquired Ku Ka echo simultaneously. The are processed estimate SSH retrieval after series procedures (including compensation, range migration correction, multi-look processing, waveform re-tracking). accustom model that fully considers both attitude variation aircraft elliptical footprint beam established. retrieved compared with public along flight path at day, showing good consistence bands. By calculating theoretical re-tracking re-processing into different bandwidths, it demonstrated ratio possible 1.4 within 27 km offshore area, which indicates performance.