Validity assessment of SAMOSA retracking for fully-focused SAR altimeter waveforms

We demonstrate in this work how we can take advantage of known unfocused SAR (UF-SAR) retracking methods (e.g. the physical SAMOSA model) for fully-focused (FF-SAR) waveforms. Our insights are an important step towards consistent observations sea surface height, significant wave height and backscatter coefficient (wind speed) with both UF-SAR FF-SAR. This is particular interest altimetry coastal zone, since clutter may be filtered out more efficiently high-resolution FF-SAR waveform data, which has potential to improve data quality. implemented a multi-mission processor Sentinel-3 (S3) Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich (S6), using back-projection algorithm, analysed ocean statistics compared multilooked UF-SAR. find that averaged power waveforms over virtually identical, while better resemble zero-Doppler beam. explain model similarities differences via theoretical considerations integrals. These findings suggest use existing S3 but beam S6 waveforms, instead. Testing outlined approach short track segments, obtain range biases between lower than 2 mm 5 cm.