Monitoring Sea Level and Topography of Coastal Lagoons Using Satellite Radar Altimetry: The Example of the Arcachon Bay in the Bay of Biscay

Radar altimetry was initially designed to measure the marine geoid. Thanks to the improvement in the orbit determination from the meter to the centimeter level, this technique has been providing accurate measurements of the sea surface topography over the open ocean since the launch of Topex/Poseidon in 1992. In spite of a decrease in the performance over land and coastal areas, it is now commonly used over these surfaces. This study presents a semi-automatic method that allows us to discriminate between acquisitions performed at high tides and low tides. The performances of four radar altimetry missions (ERS-2, ENVISAT, SARAL, and CryoSat-2) were analyzed for the retrieval of sea surface height and, for the very first time, of the intertidal zone topography in a coastal lagoon. The study area is the Arcachon Bay located in the Bay of Biscay. The sea level variability of the Arcachon Bay is characterized by a standard deviation of 1.05 m for the records used in this study (2001–2017). Sea surface heights are very well retrieved for SARAL (R~0.99 and RMSE < 0.23 m) and CryoSat-2 (R > 0.93 and RMSE < 0.42 m) missions but also for ENVISAT (R > 0.82 but with a higher RMSE >0.92 m). For the topography of the intertidal zone, very good estimates were also obtained using SARAL (R~0.71) and CryoSat-2 (R~0.79) with RMSE lower than 0.44 m for both missions.